Yep, I remember that summarize is only available for longer topics.
NO, summarized view does not show the most liked post in the topic right after the topic starter. E.g. Sam's personal "minimal" topic list design has a number of posts with 14 and 12 likes… However, it is not obvious to find them even in summarized view, they are hidden somewhere it the middle of the summarized view. You should scroll all the summary to find it out… At the same time, most of the pragmatic readers should be OK with the top several proposed designs…