I agree with the sentiment of avoiding unnecessary stuff. But...consider:

1. It's hard to argue that the idea is entirely daft, given that built-in facility to do it (sp_createstats)

2. SQL Server will only update statistics if they are potentially useful to the optimizer, and found to be out of date. Statistics that are never useful will never be updated, and therefore add little overhead.

3. If the statistics would be useful, they will get created at some stage anyway.

Swings and roundabouts. It depends. Horses for courses. And so on.

As I said, I think I would just convince the people concerned that 99.9% of systems are happy with auto-create and async-update stats options. Creating all the statistics would be kinda pointless, but maybe not actually dumb.

Paul