“Display on startup” and “autostart” are Duplex options, so yeah “initialization” in the GridPie settings is the one we will need to look closer at.
Currently, it has three options: manual start, auto (stopped) and auto (playing). What I’ll do is to change the way the “auto” options work, so that they’ll be able to adapt to new songs automatically. Currently, this doesn’t happen as I deemed it would be a bit intrusive … but with the “manual start” being the default option, you still have a choice between a less intrusive GridPie, or one which will aggressively take over, and play songs 
So, let me just understand this - the MIDI Control device doesn’t transmit anything when the track is muted?
Can’t really see a clean solution to this, excerpt perhaps to make it a part of the workflow to have a fully-enabled (empty) pattern as the first one.
Then, this “dummy” pattern could also contain the pattern length - a thing we talked about earlier on - to force short sequences into longer ones.
Btw: cool to hear that you’re still into the alternative workflow that is GridPie. Did you read about the MLR-alike sequencer that was discussed
in this other topic? With a bit of luck, we could have both, co-existing