I havent pore filled per-se, but I have used a lot of epoxy and CA on my guitars and I have had some pretty impressive catastrophes.
Here are a few:
CA wicking deep into end grain/wavy grain/figure and leaving weird blotches in places.
CA kicking over too hard and foaming up.... Turns into ugly white/yellowish porous hard rock foam. It seems like it was worse on deeper fills.
CA soaking into a ding I was drop filling and leaving a dark, ugly stain under the finish.
CA joints turning dark surrounded by very light wood - ugly...
CA is often harder to sand than the surrounding wood...
Epoxy wicking deep into end/wavy grain/figure leaving weird blotches.
Epoxy not kicking over and staying gooey (a hair dryer is your friend)
Epoxy kicking over too fast and gelling in the middle of the work
Epoxy peeling back off the wood and out of the ding when sanding a filled ding..
Many epoxies yellow over time - which isnt good on a water clear finish.. But doesn't seem to matter on an amber/yellow/darker finish like Varnish.
My experience is that epoxy is much less likely to leave blotches and dark spots than CA. It also is pretty transparent under your finish - and thats nice when filling in a chip. CA can leave a dark pock mark when you fill a chip...
Thicker epoxies like the cheap hardware store stuff tends to lay on the wood where the good thin stuff for boat building like West soaks in more. CA goes way down into the wood.. That makes clean up of the epoxy drips more likely to succeed vs CA...
When I do get around to pore filling - I am probably going to try either epoxy or a commercial pore filler product first. But I could see that there is significant learning curve either way...
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