Yes, and I think being conservative in prod is the right thing.
The value of having it True in dev.py is to allow developers (like me and you) who run both CMS and LMS to edit the short description, should they want to, while defaulting the production to be off.  I don't mind setting a flag to turn it on in our instance.
This way the feature doesn't get turned on accidentally on prod environments and confuse customers, but developers, who _can_ see short descriptions, get to edit it without twiddling anything.  

But, since edge and edx.org ought to set this to True and False respectively, some configuration has to be done anyway, so I'm not religious about defaulting to True vs False in `common.py`.  If you want `common.py` to default to True, and just have the devops guys set it to False, that's fine with me.