To follow up on Daniel's suggestion 3 about using a "long signal" to simulate a delay.

I've also found in my forum searches, the Zenith VCR REC button would cause a delay of 3 seconds. So I set this VCR on my other remote (URC-8820) to check, and this was true! The signal is 3-second long. But when I teach this to the VL610, it would not learn the whole signal, just a short burst, so this was not possible to cause a long delay.

In any case, I just want to report this to save others some time searching for the same thing. This Zenith VCR REC signal is pretty useful for anybody who wants to do this with URC remotes. The URC-8820 can program a 20-step macro, so it is possible to delay up to 60 seconds doing nothing :-)