Hello sgp,
Breakpoints are not intended to work outside of debugging due to how breakpoints work. Breakpoints halt the process that the debugger is attached to when said process reaches a certain line of code. Without the debugger attaching itself to the process, the breakpoint can’t halt anything.
As for the log messages, if you wish you print things out to the screen it would be best to use AddOnScreenDebugMessage instead of UE_LOG messages. You can find more about those output methods here:
I’m not quite sure I understand your example that you use however. Do you mean that if you set up a UE_LOG message to print, it won’t print unless you have the Output Log open when the event occurs? Are you sure it isn’t being pushed up the log by other messages?