EEngr and cwatters:
"The 8 sub batteries are balanced but the 6 cells in parallel in each don't appear to be. However that's not usually a problem because cells in parallel will tend to auto balance..."
They tend to auto balance as long as charge/discharge currents are not too high. If for some reason a sudden current spike occurs, then the paralleled cells can start to misbehave due to inrush/outrush currents being momentarily too high for the auto balancing mode to work fine. For normal operations this may well be not an issue at all, but if an abnormal situation occurrs and current spikes are appearing I would prefer not to have to rely on auto balancing of Li-Ion (and LiPo for that matter) cells.