You heard right about the wads, at least in my experience. I used the prelubed ones on
this page. You can get them plain and lube them yourself, or you can cut your own.
Wherever you get them, they often make a whale of a difference in accuracy. They sure did in both my 54's.
If you have a powder scale, it's worth weighing some of your new ones. If your mold wasn't really hot along with the lead, you can get a fair bit of wrinkling along the side ridges. They may not look like much, but in my experience they can really affect accuracy when you get them on only one side of the bullet for example.
You probably don't need the scale, except to convince yourself that the sum total of the wrinkles and add up to a fair bit of weight variation. If you simply set a hard standard on visual exams, that will pretty much take care of it too. At that point the only thing the scale really does is help you keep an eye out for voids in the bases.
You can spot most of the voids, but sometimes the sprue cutter can smear across a void and you'll miss it. When casting, if you're careful to pur a decent puddle on top of the sprue plate to serve as a "reservoir" of lead to continue filling the base as the lead hardens, you can just eliminate the scale too. Just by watching the puddle harden I can usually tell when there's a chance of a void.
Do you need to go to all that trouble? Depends on what you're going to do with the bullets. For target shooting, yeah, carry on with the weighing. Otherwise, nah. I usually dumped the worst wrinkles back into the pot, but if the wrinkling was slight, I'd let them live. After everything cooled, I just use the wrinkled ones for plinking and the perfect ones for hunting.
Lubing is a big "it depends" situation. Smearing Wonderlube into the grooves is usually enough, but I've been messing with my own lube. So far it's a tossup which is best, but Wonderlube should give you a fine place to start.
Carrying prelubed conicals is a problem, or should I say a mess, unless you figure out some way of holding them in place and not letting them rattle around.
Loads?
Both my 54'w are happiest with 80 grains of either 3f black or Pyrodex P. Frankly the Pyro P is both more accurate and cleaner burning.