I don't understand the reticence about milling this tree, unless you've got 5 other cherry trees waiting to be milled. You've already got a saw mill. You might end up with a lot of some fancy firewood, but you've only wasted a couple hours of your time and a little fuel. The potential rewards are great, especially for slabs out of the lower gnarly part.
You can successfully mill logs with reaction wood or their hearts off center into boards if you keep track of up and down. If you're sawing horizontally, you want to have the log in the same position it was in when it was standing (or 180 degrees off.) This would put the shortest distance between the heart and the bark either at the top or bottom. Sawing this way will reduce warp and the warp you get will be bow, the easiest to deal with in thinner and narrower lumber. If you cut boards at 90 degrees to this, you will get crook, which is what the pheniox ended up with, requiring him to rip the boards to get a straight edge. If the boards had been bowed, the deck fasteners would probably have been sufficient to hold the boards flat. The remainder of the log may bow as you cut boards off, but if you're using an Alaskan mill or similar, this will not affect the thickness of the boards, since you can reference off the previous cut. Stack and dry your boards full width, so you can take care of any crook when edging them.
For slabs from the bottom 6 ft, saw them the opposite way, since bow is a much bigger problem for thicker slabs and you you want curved edges anyway. Curved, live edge slabs make attractive benches and shelves and they can be built with a minimum of woodworking skill. Just replace those plain, store bought 1x boards you have on the cinder blocks with some 1.5 x 12 cherry slabs, or cut the narrower outermost slabs to length to use as uprights. Screw through the slab into the end of the upright, countersink and plug the holes and, voila, an attractive and unique shelf or bench.
