This post is quite old, but I am bringing it back to life with the hope of helping someone.
I had the same issue, my basic IK was breaking the skeleton and everyone in tutorials seemed to input the same axes blindly without giving explanations.
This video by AskADev opened my eyes. Turns out something was wrong in the orientation of the bones in my rig: the Y axes were not coplanar, so a secondary axis could not be defined univocally for the bone chain. In particular:
- the X axis of each bone should point to the next bone in the chain (or to the exact opposite direction)
- the Y axis of each bone should lay on the plane defined by the positions of each bone in the chain itself.
With these conditions, a primary axis of (1,0,0) or (-1,0,0) and a secondary axis of (0,1,0) should work smoothly.
So the best way to fix this is to review your original rig in Blender/Maya and fix the orientations. An alternative that does not require another software is building some sort of axes-agnostic IK solver in your control rig.
I hope this helps.