arcgis desktop - How to create contours from smoothed DEM instead of using Terrain to Raster?

I'm fairly new to working with lidar and have been assigned the task of creating 2ft contours for the entire county using USGS-provided lidar tiles. Is there a significant difference in the accuracy of contours when simply generating them from a smoothed DEM versus building a terrain dataset, creating a new raster from the terrain and then generating contours from the derived raster? The contours will become one of our data layers for purchase and may be used for anything from architectural design to wetland mitigation, so I would like them to be as accurate as possible in reducing noise and retaining real information. Any help would be greatly appreciated.