Currently, any backtick commands you execute within screen hang the terminal emulator.

Which means, if you backtick execute a command every so often that takes more than a few milliseconds to execute, it gets insanely irritating as your terminal stalls while using it every so often.

There should be no delay whatsoever.  To do that, the backtick command would need to be executed asychronously and the output would have to be read in and used as soon as the command's process has completed, which could be a few milliseconds or a few minutes later.