I am glad that you edited and added to your post I was starting to think your name should be salty johnpoz :).
I am surprised you have never seen this before. As I stated in my post this is typical of every consumer grade device that I have ever owned and configured, and all the ISP devices that I have ever used for ADSL/Cable/ and now Fiber. There have been a bunch since 1998 until now.
I did state the results from the different settings above in my post. I just posted the medium settings. I was wondering why I would need 53 open (not hosting anything) and the ICMP as well, but I am no expert.
Yes when I select the different settings nat only, low, medium, high, it changes the allowable settings and checked boxes as referenced above.
Thanks for everyone's help. I will keep reading and changing configurations until I feel confident that I can put my test pfSense box into full time operation, with vlans, dhcp, firewall, vpn, etc.
As a take away I am glad that from this discussion it seems confirmed that the default configuration of the pfSense firewall is better than my ISP box on it's high.
Thanks!
Snorf