When you have stacked Panes, Pro remembers the last Pane you had open and every project thereafter (whether a new, blank project or an existing one) Pro will open with that as the active Pane. This also happens if you have a project open and save it on a particular Pane, the next project you open or create will default to that Pane.
PLEASE allow us the choice! It would be VERY beneficial to have a toggle option to specify this (remember last pane open or specify a default pane).
This is a problem for me because I jump around between projects and often open blank projects just to do something in Catalog (I moss the old way where Catalog was separate - it being locked with Pro causes plenty of its own set of issues) or a geoprocessing tool, but 99% of the time I need to start in Catalog.
In order for this to be accomplished in Pro is to remember to close every project on the Catalog pane, and make sure that when I save any open projects to save them while the Catalog pane is open.
This is a bit clunky and annoying to say the least.