This is the kind of content I was looking for! All good stuff. Funny, I've had the same sand bags for several years now. Guess time, sun, etc. finally got to the woven plastic they were sacked in. Last year a couple made a nice, clean rip sound aaaand...Mess. Repurposed the un-vesseled stuff and never bought new bags. Procrastination at its best, forgot all about it. Tossed in the two bags that remained intact and loaded up on some snow to substitute the rest. I'll just pretend I'm being efficient.
I know what you guys mean on the directional stability. Anytime I had fight the highway in deep snow, my Tahoe's speed had a magic number. Too slow, I'd be white-knuckle driving and ruts pulling my truck all over the road (partially do to bad steering parts). Any faster and it would just be a borderline loss of control/bad time. Talk about confidence!
I've always had short wheelbase vehicles...I like them and I'm used to their behaviors. Seems like you have friendlier error correction in longer trucks. Had an eye opener one time when riding passenger with my brother-in-law. He got his quad cab Ram sideways, that was a much longer process than I was used to. Stuff getting hairy over the course of
several seconds and straightening back out took just as long. Definitely funnier after the action was over.
Over the years, I started buying more and more civilized tires. My travels are getting further on-road and I spend less time off-road. I always needed 4WD and tolerated big luggy tires for the rural deep stuff. Roads don't always get plowed and when the rain hits in the spring and fall, it's a swampy mess off pavement. This might be the first set of truck tires I bought with actual sipes in them. I hope they're worth the trade-off come the really messy conditions!