I have been digging through the forum looking for answers to this question and I have seen a good chunk of answers, but most are from five years ago.  I am using SolidWorks 2017.

I would like to take a complex assembly and make a featureless version of it.  Preferably the featureless version would be tied to the original assembly so that when I change it the simplified version updates along side it. 

I have a couple of reasons for wanting this.

1) So my large assemblies can be made significantly lighter weight by replacing feature heavy sub-assemblies with their light weight counterpart.  This is particularly bad with imported components from stl, igs, and inventor parts and I would love to not have my machine melt every time I try to manipulate my top level assembly.

2) So when I am sending clients models I can limit what they see (proprietary stuff) yet leave them with enough information that they can place my components (remove all features on the inside... maybe with planes to close off openings).

Help with this would be greatly appreciated.