When I was a teen-ager my dad had a bike with a damaged wheel. I think the rim was trashed when a car carrier was mounted too low on the lift gate.
It wasn't a fancy bike - steel rims. The bike shop told him to just get a whole new wheel. This irked his depression-era sense of economy, since "that hub is still perfectly fine!"
So he read up on wheel building. At the time, of course, this meant going to the library and getting actual paper books and reading them.
"I can do this," he said. So he got a new rim and spokes and built up a new wheel. No issues, tight and true. Rode on it for the rest of his life.
He had comments along the lines of, "I don't know why they make such a big deal of that." What he failed either to understand or to admit was that he was a bit of a mechanical genius, and knew how to approach the project in just the right "go slow" way, that 99% of people would not have been able to manage.
these days wheels at that level are pretty well prepared from the factory. I'd work with your shop to sort out the wheels.
With normal wheels, you have usually 32 spokes and it's easier for the average person to work with them. The tensions are lower, more spokes to adjust things. The newer wheels, especially the 20-24 hole wheels, have very high tension, which means it's very hard to actually turn the nipples. And the adjustments have a greater effect on the wheel. God speed Architect!
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