For me, the logical state of the "Publish" flag should be "No" when you start a new article. This ensures that nothing is published by accident.

But I can not find any setting that allow me to change this. So I am guessing I will have to either change core files of K2 or make an override.

Does anyone have a good suggestion to a more elegant solution?

I think this
www.realpreview.net/
may help with what you are wanting, not sure

I was looking for a bit lighter solution than that, although I must say it adds a lot that I think should already be in K2 - trackback, pingback and pinging blogservices are also on that list :)

Thank you for the suggestion!!