Sometimes when you want to pause live video you are already recording the current channel. In such case it is not practical to start a new instant recording but it would be more practical to start replaying the recording already being made, jump to correct position in the recording and then pause. So I have implemented this for VDR-1.7.16 as a patch which adds two new options to "Pause kay handling" menu item to enable this behavior with or without confirmation.
I've always wondered myself why vdr behaves like that. Thanks for this patch, hopefully it gets included.