The pause issue was caused by how Unity triggers it's events. The ESC menu previously loaded some dependecies by script, which would only fire once the menu got activated. At the same time, it tried to set up the Options submenu, which already required one of these dependencies, causing a race condition which would then (more often than not) cause an exception and thus abort the function before the game was paused. The fix was to set up the dependencies in the Inspector, rather than by script.

The Breached and Cracked stack cap were fixed for consistency reasons. Depending on how Effects are caused, their actual value can differ, usually 2% - 4%. A stat is changed by this value times the stack. For example, Breached erroneously capped at a stack of 1, causing a maximum Energetic Defense reduction of 4%, given the value of the Effect is also 4%. Now, it's capped at 20, which allows a maximum reduction of 80% which is quite substantial.