OK, so I don't know if it's relevant, but I was running the OS from a thumb drive. In the searching for the answers to my problems, I learnt that running it from a flash drive was bad, so I enabled the fs2ram.
After editing the fstab, enabling the plugin and restarting the device, the next pool I created worked. I also didn't use any numeric values in the pool name this time (I was trying to use 12TB-POOL, and this time I just used POOL) so not sure if that too is relevant.