When importing an address (using e.g. importaddress), it is currently impossible to skip the rescan and instead ask the node to scan a specific block in which you know there are related transactions. It is pretty trivial to use a block explorer to find relevant blocks and only scan those.
Is it worthwhile to add a RPC command that lets you specify a (range of) block(s) to address this?
It looks like importaddress has a rescan arg that you can set to false. Is this not currently working? You could always abortrescan. It also looks like rescanblockchain has args for start_height and stop_height.
@okayplanet rescan works, the problem was scanning a particular block. You're right about rescanblockchain though. Not super intuitive for people, but it definitely does what you want. Thanks for the reminder! :)