See Play from Bar xx ...?, prior to that topic I had lost half my hair fighting the urge to throw this expensive piece of gear that cannot jump to an arbitrary location of a 48 bar track whose last bar I wanted to edit (but did not want to grow old listening to) at the wall…
What you describe here doesn’t quite match my experience with that behavior though, and further this ability to jump around stops working at all if player position tracking is enabled (because the restart point is where you press stop, which is the currently playing page). But maybe there’s something else affecting the behavior too. What restart option exactly you have Play pad configured to? Mine is at “play/restart”, which I think is the factory default.