I previously worked for a state government, and owned a project that served districting information. It was used by constituents to find their elected officials and to display different types of districts on maps.
I pushed out a bug that took down the mapping functionality. Normally this would not have been that interesting, but at the time the state was in the middle of a heated redistricting debate. Some newspapers around the state picked up on the outage and attributed it to shady dealings from the majority party at the time.
Slightly different, but it's not often that I have the opportunity to check in code that will lead to a conspiracy theory.
The experience of a new user in your app can turn out to be a pretty critical moment when it comes to retention. Having a flow specifically for new users is common and does the job of easing them into whatever necessary complexity exists in your default state.
http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2014/0...