Unnecessary frame dropping due to CPU lagging behind?

It seems like the game will stop drawing the screen when the refresh rate starts dropping under the simulation 30 Hz tick rate. This can be a good idea when the GPU is lagging behind, but it is not too productive when the CPU is the culprit. I'm not a 100% that this is what happens, but I've noticed that during worst lag episodes when updating the frame can take several seconds, pausing the game intermittently for a short moment can improve the frame rate by a lot. It seems like when the framerate starts dropping, the game tries to compensate by dropping more and more frames until you get a new one every 10 or even more seconds.

If my hunch is right and frame dropping is the cause for this behaviour, having a switch to disable the feature in options, or better yet implementing a better heuristic for determining when to drop frames should be fairly easy fixes.