Yes, unfortunately it can be a common occurence in some areas where the infrastructure is either not well maintained physically, is frequently impacted by weather, or simply undersized for the subscriber density leading to sustained outages.
We have multi-tiered logic that checks for lost Internet connectivity over a time period as you described. This makes it resilient to short lived disruptions in connectivity. We can certainly look at including a power-user override of the default “safe” behavior but I think it is worth re-stating that even if the modem does keep attempting a handshake it may take a manual intervention such as a a full power cycle before it can complete connection. This simply depends on the health of the cell, what took it offline to begin with, and how long it takes to recover.
Currently we do have a basic read-only API that provides JSON output for monitoring but nothing permitting config changes outside of the UI at present. Stay tuned. Thank you very much for the feature requests and feedback!