Here's where you'll get different opinions when asking different beekeepers. I always have my smoker handy, especially on cut outs.
The bees will generally be the most pissy when accessing the void space, this is when smoke is most needed, imo.
After the void space is carefully accessed, most colonies settle down and become workable, at least in my area.
Bee vacs come in handy when there are a ton of bees and you need them out of the way so you can see what you're doing.
I absolutely hate wearing gloves when working bees anytime, especially on cut outs.
Yesterday's removal I wore my left glove most of the time. After vacuuming a couple of boxes of most of the grouchy bees, they settled down.
I still took about 15 or so stings yesterday, but the smoke helped a bunch as did the vac.
In all I vacuumed four boxes of bees and placed several thousand bees in my set up before shaking them in the end.
I use these from H.D.
They give good dexterity and the bees cannot sting through.
...JP