As a group we have tried this earlier in our HQ play, we had 3 levels of roll, similar to your suggestion, a straight forward roll without augments, a roll with up to 3 augments, and an all out roll with maximum augments.
In my opinion, (Matthew may have a different memory of the experiment) it failed badly. It only served to reinforce the importance of winning individual contests. Although my original intent was to grade contests by importance of exploration, it gave the impression for the players that the situations themselves had preconceived outcomes, graded from trivial roll that is losable -> important to win but losable -> win at all costs.
It may work if the players choose how important the contest is to explore on a case by case basis, but that is only narrowly different to the player choosing how many augments to use in the first place.
My personal opinion is that choosing augments should not be directly related to increasing the chance of winning but instead should be about expressing the character's investment in the contest. Which leads to the idea that a loosing outcome should reflect that investment failing and so, in a not necessarily mathematical way, augments are about putting aspects of your character on the line.
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