The very short answer: You had bad temperature control.
You have to leave meat on the skillet until the proper internal temperature is reached. If the outside burns before that, then you used too high heat. Also, if you have a very thick steak, you may need to use more involved methods.
A longer answer: It is absolutely normal that cast iron behaves very differently from a typical thin nonstick pan. This is why people are making such a big deal out of the kind of pan they are using - cooking with both is simply different.
When transitioning to using the cast iron, you have to take into account that it has a much better heat transfer into the food, but also reacts a lot slower to changes in the burner setting. It also manages to make much better crusts, I suspect that this is because it stays very hot in the places where it makes contact with the food, as opposed to an aluminum pan where the heat gradient might extend a bit into the pan itself.
So you will need to learn to recognize when the pan is at the proper "temperature" (actually, the proper rate of heat transfer) and use a burner setting that provides that temperature and not a higher or lower one. The smoking oil is not a good indicator, because the smoking oil is only an indicator of the current temperature at the current moment, not of the rate of heat transfer at equilibrium. You will simply have to experiment until you have found the right setting for your burner, pan and usual meat thickness. You also have to curb your impatience and give it enough time to reach that temperature at the needed setting (which will be lower than the one you are using now). And if you notice that you made a mistake and the setting is too high or too low, you can of course regulate during cooking, but remember that the pan will react very sluggishly. So after each change, wait for several minutes until it takes effect, before intervening again.
All that time, you have to be aware that the appearance of the crust has nothing to do with the actual doneness. Either learn to recognize the doneness by touch/pressing, or, much simpler, use a meat thermometer.
Last but not least, consider also using methods beside simple "throw it on the pan and wait", for example Alton Brown's oven+pan steak. They are certainly more work, but they have a much higher chance of success for somebody who is starting out.