In my opinion the best thing to do as a next step is the cloning and sequencing of clones that have a long fragment and possibly of the size expected

No band in first round is not surprising. I, personally, have had great luck cleaning up smears by doing a gradient of the annealing temperature during the PCR. Smears from PCR, in my experience, mean the primers are not properly optimized and are priming non-specifically. This is especially problematic for rare templates. 

you can try to clone the product of the nested PCR