Best practises for config sync when making changes via icontrol

I've a build system which is successfully adding and removing nodes and pool members, and all is pretty sweet, however I'm unsure about how best to approach issues like config sync when this is happening. How do other people deal with maintaining config integrity between an HA pair? Ideally I'd rather not be syncing at all - it strikes me as very odd that config sync still seems to only check timestamps of configs rather than actual differences line by line. I'd feel much more comfortable to be able to do something like add a pool member on the standby device, make sure it comes up happy, and then add it to the active device. As I'd then have made the same change on both sides, the configsync should *not* need changing, but there's no logic to know that. Obviosuly I can call a config sync within iControl, but I'd rather not need to. Maybe we should make a tranche (sp?) of changes on standby and the flip the whole lot over in a single sync? This seems reasonable when rebuilding entire pool contents wholesale, but we're also looking at trickle rebuilding pool members, rebuilding every back end machine once every 48 hours or something (so need to elegantly bring the boxes in and out of service with iControl) so there then being no big switch to pull ever.

So what's the recommended (a good enough) approach for dealing with this when we're very frequently rebuilding systems and want to ensure we have consistency between the boxes.

Thanks