You stain a maple top and it goes cloudy. Dark in patches, pale in others, a blotch no amount of wiping pulls back even. The test board looked fine. The real piece fights you. The next week you stain red oak and it drinks the color like it was made for it, even and deep, grain popping the second the rag comes off.
Same can, same hand, two completely different results. The instinct is to blame the maple stain, or your technique, or the brand. None of those is the cause. The cause is the pore, and once you can see it, the blotch stops being a surprise.
Stain colors wood two different ways, and most cans don't tell you which one is in your hand. A pigment is a ground-up solid. The particles are big, hundreds to thousands of nanometers across, and they color wood by lodging in the open pores and lumens. They need a hole to catch in. A dye is the opposite. It's a dissolved molecule, a few nanometers across, small enough to soak straight into the cell walls. It doesn't need a pore. It goes everywhere.
That one fact is the whole oak-versus-maple story. Red oak's big earlywood vessels run around 332 microns across. Wide, continuous channels that catch pigment deeply and evenly down the length of the board. That's why oak takes color so willingly and why its grain jumps. Sugar maple's vessels average about 28 microns, and there's no big-pore structure governing where the color sits. What controls maple's uptake instead is the surface itself at a tiny scale: ray fraction, local resin, the glaze your planer left behind. Those vary randomly across the board. Random uptake is exactly what a blotch is. The maple didn't fail. It was always going to do that, and the oak was always going to behave, because their pores aren't the same size.
So you don't fix a pore problem by buying a better pigment. You change the mechanism. You've got three ways out, and they're not brands, they're moves.
Reduce the variance. A washcoat or conditioner partially seals the thirstiest spots before the color goes on, so the soft patches drink less and the whole surface evens out. Good when you want to keep the pigment look but tame it.
Ride on top. A gel stain barely penetrates at all. It sits on the surface instead of soaking into the lumens, so the pore size underneath stops mattering. Good on blotch-prone wood when you want control over even color.
Skip the pores entirely. A dye works at molecular scale and colors the cell walls regardless of pore size, so it lays down even on maple that pigment would wreck. Good when you want clean, deep color on a diffuse-porous wood.
The takeaway is one question, and you ask it before the can comes off the shelf. What kind of pores are you staining? If it's a big-pored, ring-porous wood like oak, pigment will behave and the grain will pop. If it's a tight, diffuse-porous wood like maple, plain pigment is going to blotch unless you condition it, gel it, or switch to dye. The blotch was decided before you opened the can. Decide it on purpose instead.