How to bake good AO/curvature maps with only low/medium poly objects?

tonpix

Problem - I want to have hard surface objects with nice bevel effect and keep low/medium poly count, while maintining fairly fast workflow. As far as I know, there are few ways to do that:

1). Make high poly, then retopo it to low/medium poly, unwrap and bake high poly on them to create normal map that gives the beveled effect. Very time consuming and having normal map without distortions/artifacts on bevels or protruded parts (like hard edge of low poly popping out) can be difficult as it requires some tweaking for baker, good topology and fiddling with cages.

2). Just make high poly and put it into game. Fast and inefficient for gaming purposes, but may be good for stills/pre-rendered animations

3). Add simple bevels (1-3 segments) and edit vertex normals so shading is correct. There are plenty of plugins for 3d packages to do this (I use y.a.v.n.e for blender). This is the route I'm going through at this moment.

However, I can't bake good AO and curvature maps due to conflict with seams. Whenever seam is on curvature/ao areas, it causes wrong values in them. The workaround is placing seasms on flat surfaces near bevels. But it may cause distortion as flat surface polygon needs needs to bestretched in uvmap.

(notice cut in value transitions in seam areas, they're on bevels)

I'm not sure what to do.. I'd really appreciate any help or tips, I've been searching for sulution on google/polycount/discord and I was unable to find answer for reliable solution. 

Regards,