Do you bother with ground pour on 2-layer boards or just route everything by hand?

I pour on everthing now, but I learned the hard way why your last revision felt messy. I set my first pour clearance way too small and got all those sliver fills you're describing, plus the pour would grab an island here and there that wasn't connected to anything. Once I pushed the clearance out so thin stubs just don't form, and enabled the option to remove dead copper, the board cleaned up overnight. Two layer motor controller is basially the exact case where I'd pour, because you need every bit of ground return you can get when there's no dedicated plane underneath. On the stitching question, I connect at a bunch of vias, not just a couple at the edges. When I only tied the pour down in a few spots I had a board where a sensor line ran over a section of pour that had a long path back to the main ground point, and it picked up enough hash from the motor switching to jitter my readings. Adding vias every so often along the pour quieted it right down. Nothing scientific, I just sprinkled them wherever the pour ran more than maybe a centimeter from a via.

I'd say the cosmetic mess is a settings problem, not a pour problem. Crank the clearance, kill orphan islands, and it looks tidy and actually does something.

I stopped pouring on two-layer boards a few years back and my boards got better for it. The deciding moment for me was a small gate driver board where I spent two days chasing a noise problem that turned out to be a switching return current wandering through a big stitched pour instead of coming straight back under the trace. Once I ripped the pour out and just drew a fat deliberate return path, the ringing on the gate settled right down and I could actually see what the current was doing in the layout. On a two-layer board the pour is usually too broken up by traces to act like a real plane anyway, so you get the downsides of both approaches. It looks tidy from far away, but every gap and island is a place where return current can take a detour you didn't plan. With hand-drawn fat traces I can point at any net on the board and trace where the loop is, which matters a lot when you've got a motor switching a few amps.

These days my rule is simple. If the board is mostly digital and low speed, pour and stitch it, it costs nothing. If there's a motor driver or anything switching real current, I pour only where I can keep it wide and continuous, and I route the high-current returns first as actual traces before anything else touches the board. My KiCad footprints now come with return paths drawn in so I don't forget them at 2am.

The discussion regarding the physical distribution of the ground area is quite relevant, because even if you ensure excellent connectivity, the sheer current density that flows through a narrow, uninterrupted ground path during high-speed switching can generate unnecessary thermal stress on the copper itself. I have found that when designing a low voltage motor driver, increasing the physical width of the ground pour, even if it spans across multiple unused areas, helps distribute that return current more effectively and keeps the temperture stable. Have you considered how the copper area itself acts as a heatsink for that switching noise, not just a return path?

I found that even with the pour dialed in, a bunch of the high current switching power traces still needed specific attention. When I'm driving that motor, the trace width really dictates how much heat I'm pulling up. Even if the ground is perfect, if the power path is too thin, you just get excessive temps before you even worry about noise. I try to make those power lines noticeably wider than everything else on the board, just so the heat dissipation is handled properly. Have you thought about how much current your motor draws to decide the trace widths?

Update: tried bumping the pour clearance way out like you said and the sliver mess is basically gone, board looks readable again. But now I'm second guessing where to stitch it after that gate driver story about return currents wandering around. When you do stitch a pour on two layers, do you pick spots near the switching stuff first and work outward, or just spread them evenly?