Most of my experience is with A5C vestigial sideband transmission in TV. The visual carrier is only 1.25 MHz (+,-10KHz with licensed offset) above the bottom of the channel assignment. You have your carrier, upper sidebands and part of the lower sidebands. There is your chroma subcarrier added to you visual signal. The aural carrier is added by a separate power amplifier through a device called a notch diplexer.
The advantages of SSB and DSB are definately on the transmitting side. There is no information in the carrier so why waste the power to send it if you don't have to. The receiving side must be able to faithfully recover the carrier, to insert into a balanced demodulator, to recover the information.
In TV, we only send the max power during horizontal and vertical sync pulses. In UHF broadcasting, we use a technique called Mod Anode Pulsing to increase beam currents during sync. So our 110 KW visual output and 2 MW ERP (effective radiated power), was only a valid number during sync, and much higher than an average.
One form of DSB suppressed carrier that we all enjoy and rarely think about, is any FM stereo broadcast. In radio, a 19KHz stero pilot signal is sent to light the light, and get doubled to recover the 38KHz subcarrier, used to reconer the (L-R) stereo subchannel. In TV MTS, we use the 15.734 KHz horizontal frequency as the stereo pilot. In both TV and radio, sharp cutoff filters are used to roll off the audio below the pilot signal. Phase modulation of the stereo pilot by audio is not a good thing.
Joe
