I agree that the default value should change, but wonder if the way the situation has changed is worth changing the language of the question. In Chef 10, the server and client would use the validation key from the same path in /etc/chef by default, but in Chef 11 they're different places. If you're a noob, you may have seen one or the other path somewhere and you may not grasp enough yet to know which one is supposed to go here. I'm just thinking about a noob typing /etc/chef/validation.pem in here.