Something tells me that they wouldn't work very well while traveling towards a star, which means that it wouldn't be terribly useful for interplanetary travel or whatever.
By the time you're going
towards the star.... you're of course looking to slow down from whatever heady excesses of velocity (*ahem*) that the solar sail got you up to while departing your original system...
Still, we're talking about generation ships with decreasing acceleration as you leave your home system (with or without a projected laser-assist from your home port), so there's an awful lot of coasting or near-coasting before you finally get the opportunity to achieve increasing deceleration at the other end (make sure you know how relatively active the solar pressure is from, of course)....
Maintenance? Well, from debris strikes (large area)... I suppose having an 'accident' on the way down through the destination's Oort Cloud could quite ruin your day, or at least mean you're now on a bit of a high-speed fly-by.
I was going to say that solar-sailing wouldn't actually be that good for half of interplanetary travel (i.e. inwards-going orbital transfers), but while in orbit around your planet of origin you could use it to judiciously make your orbit so your final escape from that orbit was essentially inwards... or, in other terms (or from an insignificantly attractive launch body), you're aiming back retrograde (i.e. less prograde than your orbital body). Which even with a significant component of outward force (I'm imagining a 45-degree angle away from the sight-line to the sun, but I'm sure other angles work) means you'll find yourself in an increasingly elliptical orbit (a higher aphelion, but your perihelion does lower and you're heading there first).
(All this reminds me of a children's ("young adult"'s probably being the term these days) SF book I read back when I was young, where the people on a certain watery-planet used "solar sails" to move their boats around the surface. Not only were they apparently good enough to
move boats around, and somehow not be affected by (or make use of) the wind or even stationary atmosphere, but with this planet having
multiple suns (at least three, but memory tells me it was something like seven... oh yeah, one for the astromechanics to argue over with that
little detail...) they had multiple sails, one for each sun... So they could (with skill, of course, it wasn't just a walk in the park) go
any direction they wanted, using the appropriate sails for the appropriate suns to aid in them going on their chosen heading... Almost one for the "nitpicks" thread, that one.
)