Firstly, A+ on actually testing shit because nothing made sense. It's a thrill to help you. Second, painting on normals will never look as nice as a baked map with 8xAA. If you want AA on your painted details, make sure you do your work on a canvas twice the size of your output: Want 2048² textures? Work in 4096². That…
1) Regarding the hard/soft edges stuff...in Maya i never do that, as you said it is not like 3ds Max where you must specify all the smoothing groups, in Maya the only thing that you need to do is to mark the seams for UVs. When you mark a seam, Maya will change the edge to "hard" automatically. 2) The meshes names are ok…