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My thoughts on this:

1. If you have a good map and not-so-challenging environment, I think it is ok if your odometry is not so good, because you can always tune AMCL to perform localization intensively.
2. If you have a good laser, you can consider using laser odometry to replace wheel odom completely. Hector SLAM (http://wiki.ros.org/hector_slam) and Laser Scan Matcher (http://wiki.ros.org/laser_scan_matcher) could be some good options.
3. I personally think a good odometry should have error not more than 5%, most of the time should be less than 2%. A good option is to perform sensor fusion between your wheel odom and other sensor (gyro, IMU, laser odom...) using UKF or EKF which is part of robot_localization package itself.