Originally Posted by Duster_360

Little diff take on why lipos are balanced - if you overdischarge lipo, you can potentially ruin it (a cell swells or puffs) and once that's happened, its unsafe to either charge or to use. To keep from overdisch one cell, balancing starts them out at the same voltage so the chance for overdisch is minimized as much as possible.

Builtin esc low voltage cutoffs look at total voltage not individual cell voltage so if cells start off unbalanced, potential is there to overdischarge a cell while the lvc still sees enough voltage to let it continue to run.

You don't have quite this potential for damage with the other chemistries.