I feel compelled to write a conclusion to this post as “Solved” for future readers.
We deployed the DWBAR39 barcode font for those Out of Box reports, and added the Archon Code 39 Human Readable barcode font for those cases where we are are modifying an SSRS report and want to economize on space by eliminating the redundant text, or are generating a report from scratch. We intend to stay in the Code 39 realm, and just play by the rules (no case sensitive fields, no spaces, only period and hyphen special characters).
Fun Fact: If Caps Lock is on, the value returned by the barcode is not forced to all caps, but rather changes the case of that which is scanned. Since Code39 returns only upper case letters, if caps lock is on, they will be returned as lower case letters, which may play havoc on any case sensitive fields.