Official comment
@will > Unfortunately, the XDJ never did "pause" after you released a hot cue. If you're talking about the main cue, it will still do that - and always has. Is your play button being pressed at the same time? Because that would be the only way the deck is triggered into playing.
If you disable auto-cue, when you load a track, it will start playing automatically without setting a primary cue point. The options you have are:
Auto-Cue on/off - this either sets the main cue on track load (and pauses the playback) if enabled, or allows instant playback to start with no main cue.
Play Mode single/continue - this either allows the deck to load the next track, or stops at the end of the currently loaded / playing track. If you set this to continue and disable auto-cue, the player will playback through all your music. If you have this set to single and auto-cue disabled, the tracks will not set a main cue but will stop at the end of each track. If you set it to continue, but auto-cue is enabled, the next track will automatically load, but the auto-cueing will set the main cue and stop playback.
I hope that clarifies things for you.