Hi,
I’ve done the railing for the classy mayan pyramid with the cutting (Ctrl+R) tool, as I didn’t want to delete the face of the main ramp.
The result looks clean … Unless you turn to edit mode 
The top is quite a mess with all the cuts done 
The best I could do is to get rid of all the problematic vertices and recreate some clean faces.
20 faces on the top instead of 48, Yay !
I don’t know if there is another way of “cleaning” after a cut.
Edit: There seems to be a dissolve option when deleting, that automatically merge the existing parts. For example when disolving an edge between two faces, these two faces will merge and become one
Cheers!