@Calendee, we went live with our app in just 3 weeks. I just submitted our “Sun-n-Fun Find It!” app to the Ionic Showcase. Thanks for all your help!
I did find what was preventing the Leaflet map markers from responding to a tap which prevented opening/closing marker popups. Ionic’s preventGhostClick(e) method was sending back a false positive. Specifically, isScrolledSinceStart(e) was returning true on a tap on the map.
Due to time constraints, we put in a nasty hack to prevent this method from being called when the map was active. Also due to time, we opted for straight Leaflet and not the Leaflet-Angular directive to avoid untested unknowns.
Hope this helps others.
I submitted the issue here.