Considering how (not) often it is you want to request data and immediately re-render, it'd make more sense to just background everything by default and require an explicit background: false to force a re-render. If this turns out successful, we might want to consider removing the option altogether in the future (post-v2). We're kind of the exception in trying to provide some sort of autoredraw mechanism from network requests, and it's not like they couldn't drop a .then(m.redraw, m.redraw) at the end if necessary.