I had to use beads on one of my small personal trucks that had 38x15.5 mud tires on It, daily driven. The tire shops told me they couldn't balance them in the traditional manor with weights because they were too big. I never had a problem with them in 40k miles, no shimmy/shake or anything else.
When it came to my big bolt I did a lot of reading and found that like you said David lots of places don't bother doing anything to balance them. In my opinion the $5-10 for a bag of beads per tire is cheap enough to not have to take the chance of having to pull the tires off again to add them after i could possibly take the truck for a ride and discover that they need to come back off to have beads installed. The amount of work and time involved for me personally isn't worth the chance if I did it myself. Definitely not worth it if I have a tire shop do it.
I'll add that there are plenty of sites out there that have detail list of how many ounces of balancing beads a tire should have in them. I am currently in the process of replacing my 20" split rims to 22.5s. My rear tires are off and I'm cleaning the rusty hubs up before I put my shiny rims on with new tires.
