Every time I did this operation in Blender, I had to go back to the weight painting step. I wanted to do the job once, in a recoverable way, without having to reinvent the wheel each time.

So, to achieve my goal, I created EBBAWT, an add-on that allows you to prepare a special armature, an EBBAWT armature that, once saved, can be modified and used for another job or to improve the current project and do the same weight painting every time, for you, just with a simple "Set parent with automatic weights".

Afterwards, EBBAWT tools will allow you to retrieve a "normal" armature and a mesh object with a perfect weight painting!

Furthermore, regarding vertex groups, EBBAWT comes with additional tools that will make your Blender life easier!