None of the Farmall "letter-series" 4-cylinders had a balance shaft...and they did OK, for their era.
With a 4-cylinder 4-stroke engine, you have a cylinder firing every 180 degrees of crankshaft rotation; with an inline six, you have a cylinder firing every 120 degrees. If bore and stroke are equal between the 4 and the six--which seldom occurs--the six always has two more "mouths to feed" at any given RPM.
About the closest to the "all things being equal" that I know of in the IH/Farmall line are the 806, which had the 301 cid gas six...and the 544, which had the 200 cid four. [Since you brought up balance shafts, I chose a 4-cylinder that has one.] Same bore and stroke, just that the 806 had 50% more cylinders. The 544 was rated at about 53 PTO horsepower, and used 4.4 gallons of fuel per hour. The 806 was rated at 93 PTO horsepower, but consumed 7.4 gallons per hour to do it. So the 50% more cubic inches produces 75% more horsepower...and uses 68% more fuel to do it. [Notice, too, that the C301 in the 806 is rated at 2400 rpm max, and the C200 is rated at 2200 rpm.]
So which tractor is "better"? Depends on what your needs are for a particular job. If you need a 120 hp tractor, BOTH are gonna suck. If the job only requires around 50 hp or less, why not use the 4-cylinder and put the fuel savings in your pocket? And when you get to the point of needing 75-80 hp, the 4-cylinder is gonna suck. As I said, it all depends on what your NEEDS are. Y'know why 8N Fords remain popular? Because that's all the tractor some folks NEED for what they do with a tractor.
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Today's Featured Article - Picking Corn - by Rick Nikolich. It was the day before Christmas shutdown at work and I asked our lead engineering expert Scott Andrzejewski what he was going to do over the holidays. He said that he had some corn that he still needed to pick with an antique one-row New Idea corn picker. Scott has a nice farm about an hour north of Lansing in St. Johns, MI. He wanted to get the rest of his corn in by the next day (Christmas Eve). We had about an inch of new snow on the ground and single digit temperatures. So in the bac
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