Maya's default face weighting is not the same as some of the face-weighted pipelines you may have read about. It does some weighting, but not enough to turn a bevelled cube into a nice looking object, for example. Unless things have changed in the latest release, it's not going to be what you're looking for.
Face weighted normals is not a panacea . They helped mostly on boxy shaped things with geometry bevels. Their main purpose is transferring shading gradients from big flat quads to smaller and thin bevel ones. Not working that good on intersecting cylinders for example. If your next LOD is without those bevels already it…