Ok so I did even more testing and was more diligent in testing and compared outputs of an electric furnace with prod and one without prod and using ignored_by_productivity on a recipe and ignored_by_productivity does work!
I wish that wube would change it so that the productivity progress bar would go away on recipes that have ignored_by_productivity. This gives a false impression that prod is working but in reality it is not when ignored_by_productivity is enabled. But hey at least electric furnaces work with dehydrating and thawing now.
I will add this in 1.0.5