At the short focal lengths you're talking about, accuracy of polar alignment need be only approximate, but it is still more important than keeping the guide star centered in a high-power eyepiece, assuming that your scope has a fairly smooth drive. The exposures I talked about with my hand-driven platform used no guiding eyepiece at all, and 90% of them turned out well.
It's when you move up to shooting through a scope that the hard learning curve kicks in. I'm still working on that curve.

--Dan again