Impossible To Manually Set Up HLOD?

Is there really no way to manually define a LOD actor and the actors in the level it replaces? I am finding that the limitations that the HLOD panel forces (no skeletal meshes, no actors with movable components) make it nearly useless for us. I can select the actors in the level and merge them to generate a good proxy, but there seems to be NO WAY for me to then manually define a HLOD in the world that connects my proxy to the actors it should turn off.

This seems kind of crazy and I feel like I MUST be missing something, but all my searches online have produced no results. PLEASE HELP! this is proving to be a huge problem for console performance.