Once upon a time, on a dark day, December 21st, 2011 to be exact. There was a desire to modify a Drupal webform. Normally, one could use replacement pattern tokens available in the Webform UI to set default values on a component field. But this was a special day, a day where a Webform field had to be prepopulated with a value that was not available via replacement pattern tokens. So if you need to modify a Webform via hook_form_alter, try something like this:
