A lot of this "pause rage" at least from what I saw in one particular review, had to do with the fact that it prevents instant switching from screen to screen while paused and basically denies the player from being able to set up attacks and other various things.
The justification here is that its not realistic to expect the player to be able to do all these different roles at the same time. Honestly I think that's just part of the challenge of playing the game and such a pause feature could well be looked on as an exploit or a cheat.
As far as people being sour that you actually need to "click off" the screen one it appears (you can't just press esc. again to resume the game) I look on that as more of a fail-safe than anything else.
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