Can't read titleTextAttributes on appearance for UITabBarItem - ios

Question

I am working on styling the app I'm building. I want to apply some system-wide styling (fonts) to the tab bar and then in some instances style things like colour. I'm running into two problems:
When you set any titleTextAttributes using setTitleTextAttributes:forState: on an instance of a UITabBar, it immediately ignores any titleTextAttributes set on the appearance proxy (including keys that were not set on the instance, but set on the appearance proxy).
// AppDelegate
func application(application: UIApplication, didFinishLaunchingWithOptions launchOptions: [NSObject: AnyObject]?) -> Bool {
UITabBarItem.appearance().setTitleTextAttributes([
NSFontAttributeName: UIFont(name: "Lato-Regular", size: 20.0)!
], forState: .Normal)
}
// Later on in a ViewController that has a UITabBar
override func viewDidLoad() {
myTabBar.setTitleTextAttributes([
NSForegroundColorAttributeName: UIColor.blueColor()
], forState: .Normal)
// Tab bar items now have blue text, but Helvetica Neue font
// We've lost the appearance proxy font (Lato-Regular)
}
In order to fix (1) I was just going to copy the titleTextAttributes from the appearance proxy and then overwrite them with whatever attributes I wanted to apply on the instance. Eg.
// AppDelegate
func application(application: UIApplication, didFinishLaunchingWithOptions launchOptions: [NSObject: AnyObject]?) -> Bool {
UITabBarItem.appearance().setTitleTextAttributes([
NSFontAttributeName: UIFont(name: "Lato-Regular", size: 20.0)!
], forState: .Normal)
}
// Later on in a ViewController that has a UITabBar
override func viewDidLoad() {
var attributes = UITabBarItem.appearance().titleTextAttributesForState(state) ?? [NSObject: AnyObject]()
assert(attributes.count > 0, "Could not read titleTextAttributes set on appearance proxy!")
}
This is most annoying because you can read appearance proxy values on UINavigationBar just fine.
Any ideas?