Christopher, if you want to write full technical documents with lots of references, math, etc., why don't you just use LaTeX? Texinfo is not designed for this. Trying to shoehorn it to fit seems fraught with problems.
Using @ref for bibliography entries seems like a problem in the first place. Texinfo doesn't have any real bibliography support. All the workarounds in the world are not going to produce robust output or processing. Just my unasked-for $.002, sorry, Karl
