I agree with the fact that pause should invalidate the single lap that it is running in the moment the game has been paused, but absolutely disagree about the uselessness of hotlaps.
Imho are very usefull, i have pratically learned the racing tecniques watching hotlaps, and LFS is the only simulator that allowed me to improve in that way.
In other communities, like GTR2 or rfactor ones, all replays and setups are kept like secrets, and it's really hard to improve without having some visual example.
Another usefull things hotlaps do is saying you a very good time to which refers for knowing how much are you going fast.
Knowing WR time in a certain track allow you to understand if you are running around the track only sufficiently well (within 1,5 sec from wr), good (within 1 sec) or very good (within 0.5 sec).
Imho obviously