Smoothing load cell readings with a capacitor
Is this a worthwhile endeavour?


You may be missing the whole point here....

There is a subject matter called dithering and it's useful when sampling a noisy signal. It gives you more ADC resolution. Each 4 samples taken and added gives you a resolution increase of 1 bit.

Decibel increase in resolution = 10log(oversampling rate) and if the oversampling rate is 4 then the resolution increase is 6 dB.

On the other hand smoothing a really noisy signal is a good idea but, if you are trying to get resolution increases by over sampling then don't over-smooth the signal or you won't be able to make dithering work.

Consider a 1 bit ADC (a comparator) then consider the comparators output when the signal is noisy: -



Here's another example: -