Also, I am under the impression that even though PoS uses CPU, the ability to stake coins faster does not depend on CPU processor speed so increasing your CPU percentage used by the yacoin client won't benefit you.
Exactly.
I thought (and I very well may have misunderstood), that while POS minting the wallet pauses for about half a second between each hash; and this was originally intended to maintain low cpu usage. Is it possible to remove this pause, increase CPU usage, and increase POS output?