I have been an Evernote user for close to 8 years. Until a couple of months ago the preferences settings allowed me to chose any default notebook, local or synced. Very handy for me to chose a local default, and then at my leisure and convenience, decide what I wanted to sync to the server.
Starting fairly recently the new preferences settings let you only chose synced Notebooks which does not work for me.
I understand that a forced cloud service is not the best choice, hence goodbye EN.