Auto populating variant info

[estabanz]

I'm looking for the proper way to override variant creation behavior.

Let's say I have a required attribute called gender with values "Female","Male" in that order.

I create a configurable product called "Men's Large Shirt" with attribute "Color" that was added with "Use To Create Configurable Product" = Yes.

The configurable product has Gender set to Male.
There is a variant for each "Color" value ("Red","White","Black" etc).

I fill out sku, name,price,qty,weight of each variant and save, creating the product.

I then have to add an image for each variant. The gender of each variant (which is required) shows "Female" as I presume it wasn't set on creation.

Not sure if its better/easier to override the query files or the view to show any mandatory parameters when creating the variant. Also considering modifying the edit product view to hide any non required parameters so saving the image doesn't change any other data by accident. It would also be nice to be able to specify fields that are auto saved to the simple product like description, meta stuff etc.