My proposed idea is to add a "dwell after each pass" option to profile roughing toolpaths.
Here is why: I work with plastics, and the number one issue with plastics is chip management. There are lots of different ways to deal with long stringy chips from turning Nylon, Polypro etc. But even after you get the right tools, feeds/speeds, toolpaths etc, you will still end up with long stringy chips.
For example, on an outside profile turning tool path (picture a door knob like part). The tool reaches the end of the pass, and pulls away. But the chip is one long string, and since the spindle is spinning, it will pull the chip back and wrap it around the part.
One thing that works is to add a dwell after each pass. I generally use a 100ms dwell. This keeps the tool in place, while the spindle completes a few revolutions and the long chip breaks at the root (when it jams against the tool).
You can do this yourself by simply turning on single block... you will see that chips break. But don't dwell too long or you will mar the part.
Peck turning does not work. Because the tool backs off, which creates a gap between the tool and the chip. If you minimize this gap, you can break the chip, at the cost of serious wear on your machine. The gap would have to be less than your feed, or else the chip will simply slip thru, and start winding up again. On a 25,000 part run, if I add a peck every inch * multiple passes, I'd be adding over a million pecks.
Those of us working in plastics, have to manually edit our toolpaths to add chip breaking. It is easy to do on simple geometry, but on complex geometry its rather tedious to determine where the end of a pass is. Sometimes I turn off leads and transitions simply to get cleaner G code.