Ok, so this is half vent/half questions--please bear with me and excuse the long post. :)

Backstory--after a lot of back-and-forth, I finally decided to do a 10/8/6 cake....however, all my pans are straight sided with the exception of the 8". (which makes it not a true 8")  I decided not to purchase new 8" pans to keep the supply cost down for the moment, thinking I could borrow straight sided ones from someone...but NO ONE has them.  

For my practice cake, I used the pans I had.  I filled and stacked the cake, then froze it and used 8" cake boards as a guide to trim the sides.  I stuck it back in the freezer to chill to minimize crumbs, because it is semi naked and only needs one coat.  But there were 2 things I wasn't quite pleased about: (both pretty minor, but ya know....) 

1)  After assembling, I noticed that the icing started to get cracks in it, which I've never had happen.  My thought was that this was from icing when the cake was too cold?

2)  With the sides being trimmed and the cake being semi naked, you could tell that that tier wasn't as smooth as the other two because the caramelization had been taken off....so that brings up the option of buying new pans, but I don't have any ML distributors near me--Amazon prime will ship them, but if the postal service gets delayed, I would be out of options.  I'd rather not buy Wilton (pretty much all you can find around here) because ML is cheaper and 100x better.

So, do any of you have suggestions?  They would be greatly appreciated.

Not having seen the difference between cut and right-out-of-the-pan cake sides - especially if with different flavors - I'm not sure if it is just you or there is really a difference KWIM? :)   Sometimes we are our worst judge of what is right, different, etc.  Did you show your practice cake to anyone else?  Did they say anything about there being a difference? 

As for icing starting to crack - usually that indicated it is too dry.  You need to make it thinner in consistency or creamier.   Not knowing what recipe you use makes it impossible to help there.  Here is a great icing recipe to try:  https://www.cakecentral.com/recipe/22469/2-icing

I think it wasn't as smooth, and my family saw the cake, but didn't really see anything until I pointed it out.  So maybe I'm being too hard on myself.  :) 

I used the Gretchen's Bakery SMBC recipe--my go to.  It didn't seem unusually thick....but thanks for the help kakeladi!