Hi Amy,
You are not alone. My biggest - probably my only - gripe with lilypond is the uneven spacing of gracenote beams. I have attempted for a long time to solve this, or at least work around it, to no avail.
There's a function David Nalesnik wrote called \spaceStemsEvenly, but it is very hit and miss (no disrespect to David - I think it's a deep lilypond issue).
Bringing this up is good. Perhaps our colleagues have a solution nowadays? Or could this be added as an issue to address in future releases?