Is there a way to turn off hover states on course elements by default?

There's no way to globally turn off hover states on question elements and buttons. 

Do you think the default Hover states are adding too much load to the course? Otherwise, there's no need to delete them, even though they won't show on mobile devices. (I agree that it would be tedious to manually edit states for each object.)

Since you know you don't need them, in future courses, you could prepare set-up slides, manually delete the Hover states, and then duplicate those slides as needed when developing the course. 

• I usually put this type of ready-to-dupe content in a separate "storage" scene. That makes it easy to find--and easy to delete when it's no longer needed.