Still very useful. Very important is the fact that this really is a very, very clean operation. This simple fact is really very important, because it isolates the anti-aliasing step from the other operations. Compare that to brushing and blending and blurring and whatever contortions people are going through to get 6a to look like 6b. But as luck would have it we'll need the very same technique anyway for one of the cooler tricks of compositing.
First lets create another metallic version of the background.
The trick is to find a couple of areas that are to receive bright highlights. The picture below shows the dialog immediately after the Smooth button was used. In order to make it more exact in following this, just load the Silvery. ArbMap file via the Open button right in the Arbitrary Map dialog. Notice that the logo shape itself got mangled in the process, including all kinds of ugly artifacts near the edges.