"no, that gives crappy looking edges. " well its difficult to tell from what you said as "smoothed sharp" is a bit of a contraditcion:P but i think you probably mean chamfered edges, definatly chamfer twice befor meshsmooth for good effect.
how do you modellers get smoothed sharp edges? do you chamfer the sharp edges by 0 amount before you meshsmooth the whole thing? and how do you automatically select all sharp edges so you can do that?