It appears that userInteractionEnabled=NO on a parent view will prevent user interaction on all subviews. Is this correct? Is there any way around this?
That's correct, userInteractionEnabled set to NO on a parent view will cascade down to all subviews. If you need some subviews to have interaction enabled, but not others, you can separate your subviews into two parent views: one with userInteractionEnabled = YES and the other NO. Then put those two parent views in the main view.