Why is Blender's IK pole target system so difficult? Am I missing something? I'm accustomed to doing my rigging in Maya. I enjoy the precision and the constraint system is excellent.

I decided to broaden my horizons. Now the rage:

Over the past day and a half i've been messing with Blender's IK system and found it to be terribly bad. The pole target system flips my IK unless I make some pole angle adjustment. I already know how to set up the pole target so my rig doesn't twitch, that's not the problem. The problem is aiming my IK at the pole target WITHOUT having to touch the pole angle. The only way to achieve this is with a bone roll setup that hasn't been adjusted at all.

How in the hell do you guys do this? Is there some addon i'm missing?
You are trying to do impossible. Check this out how Pole target angle is exactly computed and how the IK works with it.

You either setup the pole angle or the IK base bone roll.

Adjusting the pole angle is lesser evil, that's how it should be done. Adjusting bone roll ends up in re-binding skin.

Maybe the iTaSC IK solver would suit better your application than the blender's legacy one, try it out.