Goduster,

I follow what you are saying and agree 100%. I do not know if I can explain what I am saying or not, but, it has more to do with the "feel" than the "balance" of the combo. If you have a reel that is too light, the tip of the rod will "feel" heavy and you will be constantly holding it up and the more line you have out, the heavier the tip will be. This becomes a stain on your wrist and forearm after awhile. If you have too heavy of a reel on, you will be holding the tip down until you have enough line out to overpower the light tip. The rod I really liked when I first used it just felt great. It was like I had no rod in my hand and was just casting the line. I really did not feel any rod weight and thought the rod was the lightest rod I had ever owned. Without giving any thought to the reel weight, I changed out the reel to a large arbor reel and begin to notice how heavy the rod felt. I changed back to the original reel and the rod "lost it's heavy feeling" and was a joy to fish with again.

Hopefully, some of this makes sense....