Some tires and wheels just don't play well with each other...
I've had "good" brands balance like crap on "good" Toyota wheels and I have had shit tires on shit wheels balance great. It always seems like a crap shoot...
That said, we do a lot of lifts and wheel/tire packages, sometimes you get one that take a large amount of weight and there's not much you can do about it. You can do a 180° flip and rim/tire matching, but that can only get you so far.
Road Force is a nice feature and I think there might even be specifications buried in the FSM somewhere (though one Toyota FTS told me they like to see 16lbs or under for Toyota vehicles). The Hunter machine we use now was gifted to us by the Mercedes dealership we own next door {I want to say it's some branded Elite series machine?), it's a nice machine and their backspacing cones are so nice it's almost not needed to use the finger adapter on truck wheels (seriously we've played around with both on the new balancer it makes very little difference if you mount the tire properly compared to the older machines where it was basically always needed, it only gets pulled out on real problem wheels or weird warranty stuff). The default settings on the balancer for road force are roughly as follows: 20lbs for P-Rated "Passenger Car" tires, 30lbs for "Truck/SUV", and 40lbs for "LT Tires". Anything under about 10lbs is not worth chasing further, in some cases where it's a bit excessive you can use the rim matching feature to try and turn the tire on the wheel for the best possible outcome; but it can only do so much, for example I recently converted my 35's from balance beads to sticky weights and one of my tires just wouldn't get a better number than about 31lbs ("yellow" but still within specification for LT tires), that specific tire hit a log a long time ago, so it doesn't surprise me if it's a lil wonky (though it balanced fine and I haven't had issues with it).
So it could just be that these AT3's are a finicky beast to balance? I know the 1st gen KO2's and Duratracs have always been a pain in the ass to get balanced right, just the nature of those tires.
There's a lot of variables when it comes to balancing a tire/wheel combination and I think a lot of people some times put too high of an expectation on heavier AT tires sometimes. That being said, it does seem a bit weird that they can't seem to at least get them within an acceptable range, an odd question and it shouldn't really affect balance, but it doesn't hurt to verify... your alignment is decent right? (mainly curious about toe-in; it's possible if the alignment was "just" out enough it could cause minor scrubbing/hopping that could feel like an imbalance). Are these P-Rated factory sized tires? What tire pressure you running these at?
