I worked on pulsars in grad school, and I always groused that I had to deal with ultrarelativistic plasma physics and pair-production in curved spacetime. There's a reason it's hard to come up with solid answers for these things.
Has anybody worked out yet how the polar "jets" work, or how they stay collimated over light years distant? How precisely would particle ejected need to be aimed to still be nearby other particles out that far? What could provide such precision?
For radio pulsars, I didn't think it was that mysterious. (Not like accretion-powered things, where I don't know how that works.) You've got an intense magnetic field that beams emission. At the low level any moving matter is pinned to a field line, like a bead on a wire, and that sets the direction.