I wouldn't say it's that bad, I flew a drone controlled via bluetooth with my phone, for instance.
Buffering audio is actually a great answer to disconnections. Plus, it's less energy-intensive to fill the buffers at once than to stream it as needed. And since it's pre-recorded anyway, you already have the whole buffer. Yes, initial transfer can take a while, though.
But in theory, the play/pause operations shouldn't have latency, and the bluetooth device could clearly communicate its state. I'm not sure how audio is actually implemented in the bluetooth stack, though, I've only ever done serial communication with it.