My point was that "pause" means different things (in terms of actual implementation details, not in terms of definition) depending on context. The kind of pause you want is only useful for things where the current state of some closed system can be temporarily frozen -- for example, a paused game or a paused song. The key distinction is "closed system".
Since mIRC is primarily a communication tool, timers are most commonly used for real-time interaction with an open system, i.e., IRC. The behavior of /timer -p makes sense in open systems like this.
I get that you could use mIRC to make a game, which would basically be a separate closed system, but just understand that mIRC isn't really designed around that. The current behavior of /timer -p is useful for mIRC's primary purpose, but not as helpful for pausing a game. That's OK, but let's just recognize that it's not a bug, it's just not the correct tool for what you want to do.
