I've actually found a combination of both aluminum foil and clingfilm to give the best protection. The foil is most effective at preventing freezer burn, but does nothing to isolate odors.
Since the freezer is so cold, you don't ordinarily smell much when you stick your head in there, but that doesn't mean that the odors don't spread about, and you'll notice it only once you thaw your chicken (or other food item). That's why I like to wrap my food in clingfilm as well, but more pertinent to your question, the foil is what you want to prevent freezer burn.
An answer to your edited points.
Number 4. Pores don't do much during cooking. It is about cell walls and proteins. A pore is a channel constructed from zillions of cells (like a tunnel constructed from bricks). A cell is like a bubble (the cell wall) filled with liquid (the cell plasma). The cell wall is made from zillions of proteins, like a hat knitted from wool. In freezing, the plasma turns to sharp ice crystals and tears the cell walls apart (like poking holes in a hat).
Then under heat, the proteins unravel the way you could unravel a knitted hat if you tugged at it. If you cook the meat just a little, the proteins remain bushy and soak up liquid. If you overcook it, they stretch and start looking like a long, smooth thread and can't soak up water and/or cell plasma any more. The meat tastes dry and unpleasant.
Freezing the meat is just bursting the cell walls. Unravelling the proteins is denaturation. They are two different things.
Number 1. More water does indeed mean more damage to the cell walls. No denaturation happens there, as explained above. But you can't change the amount of water within the chicken cells in any way while it lives. This amount self-regulates, like blood pressure. If you feed the chicken more water, it will excrete more water, not store it in its cells.
Number 2. You want lots of air around the chicken if you want to get ice crystals buildup on its surface. That's why Sobachatina suggested an inflated bag - to keep air around it. Also, unpacked chicken will make your freezer dirty and contaminate other food with uncooked meat juices, which is dangerous.
Number 3. As far as I know, water ice expands while cooling from 0 to -4°C and then starts shrinking. Most damage is done while the crystals expand, so I suppose that most of the damage will be completed within the first 1-2 days (depending on how long it takes for the complete chicken to cool to -4°C).
Best Answer
It seems that your concern is just that the chicken will defrost before you can finish cleaning the freezer. It won't. Just put the chicken and anything else from the freezer that you want to save in the fridge. Wipe the inside of the empty freezer down with warm soapy water. You can also add bleach in the concentration of 1 TBS per gallon (16ml to 4 liters) to water to disinfect, at that concentration you don't need to rinse. The whole process should take less than 10 minutes. Wrap the chicken a bit better this time, and replace the contents of the freezer. Start to finish, it should only take 10 minutes or so. Even if you don't have room in the fridge, your freezer contents won't defrost on the counter if you hurry.
If you need to defrost, that's a different story. Your best bet then would be to borrow a friend's freezer or use a cooler. You can speed up the process of defrosting with rubbing alcohol. Since manual defrosting would require unplugging the unit, you'll want to move as quickly as you can to protect the contents of the refrigerator, if it's a single unit.