Sweet or dry depends on the amount of residual sugar left after fermentation is over. Most mead makers I know ferment their meads dry so that there is not a drop of sugar left and then they stabilize using K-meta and K-sorbate and then they add precisely the amount of sugar they want that will result in the sweetness they are seeking. There are variations on that theme - you could add sugar to sweeten the mead or add a mead that you deliberately made with so much sugar that the yeast's tolerance for the alcohol in the mead was too low for the concentration of alcohol, or you could add honey - each results in different flavor profiles...
And alternatively, if you know what the gravity would be for the specific level of sweetness you like at the specific level of alcohol then you could simply step feed the mead with more sugar until the yeast would die from alcohol poisoning while leaving you with the amount of unfermented sugar in the honey that would provide you with the sweetness you are seeking. D47 yeast, for example, can tolerate 14% ABV (alcohol by volume) - or approximately a starting gravity of 1.110. But of course some other yeasts have higher tolerances and some have lower. Looks like your 14 lbs in five gallons means that your mead will finish at about 15 or 16% ABV
If you know that 4 oz of honey will add 10 points of gravity in one gallon (1 lb of honey will provide a gravity of 1.040 in a gallon) - then you know that if you want your mead to have the sweetness of 1.020 you need to add 8 oz to every gallon once the gravity has dropped to 1.000
Hope that this helps - but there is no such thing as a perfect mead... There are good meads and better meads...
