Last weekend I had the pleasure of judging with a brewer from, lets just call it, a large national chain of brewpubs, and had the opportunity to talk with two of his colleagues as well prior to the commencement of the competition. It went something like this (Q is me, A is them) and it's all paraphrased (note no quotation marks) as best I remember it.
Q: Do you guys check pH on every mash?
A: No. We'll check it occasionally but usually don't worry about it much.
Q: Are you doing anything to the water?
A: No. Just a GAC filter. [the local water does contain chloramine and is pretty nominal WRT other ions: alk. ~ 85, total hardness ~ 110, SO4 ~ 30, CL ~ 7, Na ~7 ]
Q: What kind of pH do you hit?
A: 5.3 - 5.4.
Q: With the water from around here? Do you use a lot of dark malt?
A: Not with our light beers.
Q: And you get 5.3 - 5.4? How can that be?
A: We throw in some acidulated malt.
One of the guys had worked at a Michigan branch and he said the water there was so hard and alkaline that he had his water trucked in. I asked if he couldn't decarbonate/soften and he indicataed that he had tried boiling but that was too troublesome and expensive so I asked about lime treatment. None of the 3 seemed to have heard of it. I said, in the awkward (for me, at least) silence that followed that homebrewers seem to worry much more about water than the pros do to which they all enthusiastically agreed.
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