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indeed the bars may be the sensor, people dont often realise the sensor is a highly polished metallic rectangle, ie a mirror and photons dont hit the sensor and vanish, they do reflect back and get re-reflected back from the last lens element in the optical train (glass is reflective too not just transparent). Depending on the shape of that final glass surface the reflection of the sensor can be distorted or even highly magnified. It's often difficult to try to see this reflection as its usually lost in the photo. So yes you may be at about the limit of your camera but I dont think anywhere near the limit of the imaging by a long way.
There are tutorials online for enhancing nebulosity without affecting the stars. With photoshop I doubt it can be done effectively but it should be doable a bit. A basic method is to take the L channel of your colour image, remove the stars, and apply the result as a mask to the rgb image so you can stretch the nebulosity only or at least mostly, without stretching the background too. I'd guess you are stretch the entire image uniformly, but being more selective lets you enhance and suppress the specific areas that need work. The end goal is basically to enhance the contrast between the interesting features and the background emptiness without bringing all the noise back to swamp everything or blowing out the stars. I do most of my processing in PixInsight and use a similar approach, its a matter of thinking how to solve the problem and understand which tools you can use in combination to achieve that.
If you're willing to bundle up your subs I could chuck them through AstroPixelProcessor which does a great job not too far from what I can do with PI and see what it comes out with, at least it'll give a good indication if your processing is close to the limit or its time to step away from DSS and PS. The offers there if you like, I'm keen to see and suspect the image can be much improved with the data you captured.
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