I'm sorry, cheating was a poor choice of word. You said what you had done in your post and I did not mean to imply you were being dishonest.
What I mean is that skinners put many tens of hours of work into a skin. The default La-5FN represents a month of my spare time, maybe 50-60 hours of work. There are around 60 layers of panel lines, rivets, 3D effects, colours, markings and weathering. Then someone comes along, spends a couple of hours altering it and calls it a new skin. This makes me feel cheated. It doesn't just devalue my work, it devalues the work of every other skinner who does it the hard way. I don't want to make a big deal about this and I'm not objecting to you submitting it.
BTW there is a vertical stretching effect on the top of the fuselage. This makes the stars appear distorted the further up the fuselage you go. If you resize the top row of stars about 30% smaller vertically you should be able to correct this.