I am not the expert on these matters but it seems like there should be a distinction between an orphan that you turn the page to see and an orphan that you jump to the facing page to see.

I don't see any distinction in CSS. Both are not recommended but sometimes you need to allow a facing page orphan in order to fix a bigger problem in pagination.

Jim Albright
Wycliffe Bible Translators

That's a good point. At the moment there is no indication that the output PDF is being created with duplex printing in mind or not, which would affect this issue.

This idea also applies to hyphenation. Hyphenation and page break is not nice. But hyphenation and turn the page is REALLY bad.

Jim Albright
Wycliffe Bible Translators

Currently Prince tries to avoid hyphenation across page breaks in all circumstances.