[Lazarus] How to change default editor font *before* primary config ~/.lazarus is created?

[Bernd]

I'm making a new installer for Lazarus on Debian and Ubuntu because
the existing ones in their repositories are just plain wrong and
broken beyond repair. I got everything working smoothly now, the only
remaining (minor) problem is to replace the default editor font
"Courier New" with something more appropriate on a Linux desktop.

Unfortunately Lazarus is ignoring /etc/lazarus/editoroptions.xml
(according to strace it is opening the file but its contents do not
seem to have any effect on the default font or any other editor
setting I have tried. Is this a bug? I think so!)  Where would be the
proper place to patch the Lazarus sources, I grepped the Lazarus
sources for "Courier New"  but the only place that came up and made
sense in this context was synedit.pp but I doubt its a good idea to
simply patch the default font for SynEdit itself, I would rather avoid
to patch anything that could potentially be linked into a user's
application compiled with Lazarus.

Where should I have a look to either fix this bug (ignoring secondary
config file) or to properly patch the default font?