Found a solution while poking around more; hope it saves someone a few hours!
I needed to instantiate my UIRefreshControl after viewDidLoad:
, or avoid setting its attributedTitle
in code at least until after that (e.g. if I enabled refreshing of the table in IB). Setting the string inside viewDidLoad: messes up iOS's layout of the control+tableview, but it's ok within viewWillAppear:
or later once the geometry is set. And I think 82 points is the height of the UIRefreshControl. Setting the refresh title in IB would've also avoided this problem, except that I was doing so in code because I didn't want to have to enable refreshing in IB all the time with each of my tables.