User interface gripe and question about G9x settings

I recently helped a friend pick out a new point and shoot to take on a vacation to Italy so that she wouldn't use up the battery on her iPhone so much.

We ended up deciding on the G9x due to the impressive sensor and its potential ease of use.  The reviews are great and the pictures look good when you take them with its full resolution.  This would be an ideal choice for her and something that I would consider picking up for myself if I fancied myself more of a photographer...  But...

She ended up setting it to the lowest resolution (720x480 email mode) on the first day of the vacation and didn't realize it until she got home and we uploaded all of the pictures to her computer.  Now she has an entire vacation's worth of photos that are all but ruined (she would have been better off using the iPhone in terms of picture quality and not having to carry an extra device around).

To be fair, when I looked at the camera I had no idea how to tell what resolution it was set on and I'm really good at dealing with consumer electronics.  The icon was the S icon and there is nothing about that icon that suggests that it is a low resolution setting and it is very similar in appearance to the L icon which is 60x the resolution.  Icon choice for the modes here is astonishingly poorly thought out (the movie resolution icon is much more informative).  There was also nothing to indicate what the numeric resolution was until I went to the screen to change the resolution. Even when I got to that screen, it only showed me iconically which mode I was in, but not what the resolution was.  I had to start selecting options before it would tell me what resolution they were.  Even to find out what resolution it was already set to involved first selecting another resolution and then selecting back.  This is radically different than the touch screen UIs that most consumers are used to and they definitely have more than enough pixels on the screen to do this in a much more intuitive way.

That wouldn't have been as much of a problem except that changing this setting involves basically just nudging the Set button with a thumb (something which happened often when she handed the phone to someone to preview a picture she had just taken) and then an accidental finger hit on the touch screen.  The setting is thus changed and there is no confirmation required.

In the end, I'm wondering why a 20mp camera even has a 720x480 setting any more.  It's antiquated given that most people send much higher resolution photos via email these days and nearly any software you'd use to share photos has automatic scaling built-in already.  It seems at best a useless feature and at worse a trap waiting to grab someone and ruin their vacation memories.  Is this really something that any consumer still wants in a camera?

Which brings me to the settings question - is there a way to disable some of these settings so that the camera defaults to best resolution when you turn it on?  She might occasionally want some manual control over photographic options like aperture and ISO and possibly white balance and/or focus points, but I don't think she'd ever want to change the resolution or any other settings related to file formats.  (And yet, one thumb slip and brushing the screen with a finger and the camera can be instructed to permanently throw out 98% of the information it captures until the mistake is discovered...?)