I honestly didn't even consider escaping while paused. I'm torn between fixing it and leaving it as an exploit. I'll probably leave it be, cos I've been considering changing the escape sequence into more of a "move the mouse from side to side to escape" so you get to do a bit more than hammer a button.
It's a good idea about pushing players out of walls, but I *think* the collision meshes might not allow that. The easiest way is to detect if the player spawns in a wall then adjust the respawn until it finds somewhere valid to spawn. The issue I keep hitting is reliably detecting what is and isn't a wall. I've got a few ideas, and I'll try to get a fix out in the next bugfix update.