@astronerd: Solving, in general, should work near Polaris--people wouldn't be able to polar-align near the northern pole if this was not the case. 
I both just successfully tried with the simulator, and also polar aligned on my telescope the other night. In both cased I was able to solve repeatedly.
I tested with ASTAP and internal Solver on the simulator, and used ASTAP with my scope the other night. [All that said, yes, solving is one of those
magic technologies that also frequently causes headaches.]

Debugging with the simulator can be tricky, for sure, and there are many parameters.  I know I had issues when debugging my polar-alignment code with it.
In this case, make sure your focal lengths are consistent (simulator and align need to be using the same--simulator focal length is set in the
Indi Telescope Simulator --> Options tab) and that the gain is high enough (I set the gain to 100 in the align tab and exposure to 4s). 

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