Just FYI, you can also decrease the crease angle and it has the same effect.
(The box just under smooth polygons in the properties window.)
I had a shotgun prop that bloomed like that on the barrel.  But I didn't want
to disable smoothing entirely, so just playing around I was able to get suitable
results by setting the crease angle from the default of 80 down to 5.
That way I still had some smoothing on the stock, but the barrel didn't
look weird.

Note: you need to leave Smooth polygons checked for this to work.