Any way to make sit-for avoid triggering redisplay in the general case?

[Dmitry Gutov]

And not just "if input is available before it starts". Or is there a 
something I can call that would have a similar effect?

Effect like "wait until either a specified about of time passes, or the 
user types something, while allowing subprocess sentinels and filters to 
run, and hopefully timers as well, all without triggering redisplay".

company-mode has a flickering problem associated with asynchronous 
completion backends, and I have a seemingly easy solution in mind that 
turned out to depend on being able to do this.