Can I set Drush to always use verbose?
This works for me in Drush 5.

In a drushrc.php file (I tested with my ~/.drush/drushrc.php you could do this per-project as well).

I simply added:

$options['v'] = TRUE; somewhere in the file. Then try issueing drush commands.

This works because of how drush_parse_args executes.