I saw that there is the ability to go from radians to degrees and back with papyrus? This seems utterly useless if there is no polar coordinate system.... or is there one that I am having trouble digging up?

The game is NOTHING BUT a Polar Coordinate System... how are you not understanding the very basics of get/setpos, get/setangle and the world coordinate system based on cells starting at position 0,0,0 and moving out in all directions from there.

Then EVERY actor and objects position exists as its own polar coordinate system with its current position in the world as its pole.

It uses a cartesian coordinate system not a polar one. It has functions for radians and degrees because they can be used in math to calculate position and angle of things as well as other such things people might wish to use for their mods.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigonometry

I still want a way to rotate an object along it's local axis...how the heck can you make something track an object that is above or below it if you can't tilt it up or down without the item doing a wacky weave due to the sequential Z>Y>X rotation the game uses?!

While I agree X that trig functions could be extremely useful in modding, how does converting from radians to degrees or vice versa help with that?

well, the sin cos and tan functions take degrees as a parameter, what if you had an angle in radians?

Convert it to degrees?

float Degrees = Radians * 180 / 3.1415926535897932384626433832795

None of the functions in papyrus get angles in radians... they get them in degrees and can be converted. If you were modding and you wanted a specific angle in radians you could do the conversion yourself and just use degrees for papyrus. Radians could be very useful in a polar coordinate system. I guess it doesn't matter really since there isn't one.

I did this in Oblivion using the Algohol OBSE plugin, it implemented quaternion converting. I'm not great at math though, I wouldn't know how to do it in Skyrim without such quaternion functions.

Could u fake a polr coordinate system that would solve both these issues like this'ish:
This is ofcourse incomplete:

You would getangle player. A series of ifs and elseifs would sort out how far your angle is from a 90, 180, 270, or 360 and then use the appropriate sin/cos to reference the position of an object if you wanted to move an object a certain distance from the player. That distance would be the hypotenuse.
You would also need a series of ifs and elseifs to sort out negative vs positive coords.. you would absolute value these negative coorrds for the trig functions. Then you would have to keep track of what's negative so it could switch them back after your position is figured out.

Brake is over maybe ill add more to this tonight.

Or simply use the built in function for it? Which is easier?