I found an improvement to my workaround -- rather than adjust the AuthController, if you change the SystemModule.class.php it is more effective. I went back and edited my comment
I'm with specialops on this - it's sad that after almost a year this miniscule feature request that has a HUGE impact on user experience has yet to be implemented. I'll try out the posted hack one of these days and report back.
Over 95% of my customers have only one project in AC. They are all met with confusion upon logging in and many of them resort to just emailing me about the projects I work on. I really hope AC gets a user experience review soon. I also hope it doesn't take another year to have this issue addressed properly.
@Ben,
Please refer to our module that will bring any customer to predefined project page, whether it's tickets, overview, discussion, etc, after logging in.
The module(RedirectTo) could be found at downloads page or in our modules bundle.