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).
Per the FDA, you can hold the ground beef, refrigerated, for one to two days.
Assuming you have:
- Bought the meat from a reputable source (you seem to have if you watched them wrap it)
- Have kept it well refrigerated since buying it, and will do so until cooking it
I would just cook and eat it as normal at dinner time tomorrow, since it has been refrigerated the entire time. 24 hours is not a magic number. 26 or 28 hours is not that different.
Now, several days extra time before cooking would be a big difference compared to several hours.
Best Answer
For meat/veg in sauce recipes I anyways freeze in boxes, and often defrost in the microwave. I tend to buy boxes that are meant for microwave use but don't fuss about this (larger quantities work well in ice cream tubs).
If you know in advance that you're going to eat it, you can defrost in the fridge. If not, aim to defrost quite slowly in the microwave and transfer to something else (e.g. Pyrex) before it gets hot. A larger container is good because it gives you room to stir, and that's a good idea when defrosting. Even the best plastic microwave containers can get very stained with hot oily tomatoes, and with others you might worry about leaching