pooling nightmare

BPT in progress

So I breezed through the body of this sweater and was pleased as punch that the color wasn't pooling too badly - the worst of it was on the sides where it wasn't very noticeable. And then came time for me to knit the sleeves. Waahh! The pooling was atrocious, even when I alternated two balls of yarn (and huge ones at that - 385 yards each). I tried alternating one round at a time, two rounds at a time, random ball changes, cutting and restarting both yarn balls, and nothing worked to prevent the hideous patches of pooling. I've ripped out the sleeve so many times that I could have knit a whole other sweater by now. Any ideas to resolve this problem or will this yarn just not work for a top-down sweater? I have a feeling it's the latter and will just have to rip the whole thing back and use the yarn for something else...[sigh]