The old uv-mapping tools are not perfect but I saw the new ones and they provided everything I missed so far (pelt-mapping, relaxing and so on). They will be in one of the next editions. Beta testers can use it even right now.

Smoothing is actually no problem. You can control it via materials, with additional polygons, with breaking edges or creating layers of polygons. If you use something like Max's smoothing groups then it also have to be prepared for DirectX like Lightwave it does: material parameters and groups of meshes. Your graphic card does not know a smoothing group, only polygons and shading.
It is no workaround, you just model, look at smoothing and break it here and there or change the material, it works smooth and perfect.