I received a bunch of isolated vertices warnings when I used my approach to address your issue, and I couldn't quite remember how I dealt with that pesky problem, lol. Anyhoo, here are my steps: 1) Select all hard edges (I did it via a script I use regularly) and set the Edge Crease value to 1.0 under Edge Properties and…
Sure throwing more geo at it will probably solve the problem, or minimize it but I wonder if the face weighted normals would solve the issue? http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/improved-face-weighted-normals
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/hard-edges Or for the ultimate control over smoothing groups/hard edges there's this: http://www.polytools3d.com/tools/polysmoother/index.html It's not free, but it's from the same dev as the fantastic Polyunwrapper plugin. It even has the visual polygroups from Zbrush. :)