Sway Bars Needed?

I ride on the other side of the fence on this issue when looking at the original, smaller rpods.  With the larger ones, especially the 2x axle yes, great idea and likely safer as well. 

In our case we have traveled with our 177 (fully loaded with 36 gallons H20- FW tank behind axle, weighs in at 2940 lbs.) for the past 13 years and over 44,000 miles, much of that going across the Midwest to get to the Rockies, and yes we have encountered huge cross winds in the process.  Our tow vehicles for the first 8 years were an '08 and '13 front wheel drive Explorer, the last 5 have been with a '95, '11, and '17 F-150.  All vehicles utilized a simple Curt friction bar and nothing else, no bad experiences or issues encountered and this is over all sorts of weather conditions such as blizzards, sleet, hail, heavy snow and rain, and cross winds in excess of 25 mph.  We keep the tongue weight just north of 11% at 340 lbs. which imho, makes a huge difference. 

A lot of problems have been encountered by those using WDH on the small trailers, the major one being the separation of front and side panels noted on the front of the trailer.  I have not seen this as an issue for those who only use a friction bar, though I am sure there have been some due to leakage issues.

This is probably true for any WDH. You would just adjust to lessen the tension on the spring bars. That being said, you have added a bunch of weight that you would not need if you went with a simple ball hitch and friction sway bar. I know our E2 hitch alone was pretty heavy. Add the spring bars and hardware and my guess is there was easily 60-70lbs in the WDH alone.