The smoothing or melting effect is a major drawback.

I haven't gotten too far into any technique to overcome this. My next step would be to determine if crease angles that are applied to normals would transfer to T-Splines (Fusion360) or PowerNurbs that allow edge weighting. Although there may be a way to control the edge weighting in these apps that looks at the angle between faces in the subd surface, instead of manually selecting each edge.