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There doesn't seem to be much 'straight up', does there? 
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That's true. But that magically changes over the course of the seasons and a single night, too.
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Much of what I am trying to see is so close to the horizon that it is obscured by trees and houses / palm trees.
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But those objects will be higher in the sky either later at night or in winter. Have a look at your astronomy app how that changes. Following the 600 rule, you are right to avoid those low targets.
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I have the 100mm lens also, I wonder if that would make a difference - maybe for the Magellanic cloud...
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a huge difference. Also in terms of shorter exposures before stars are trailing. LMC and SMC are totally cool objects in the Southern Hemisphere Sky. 2 galaxies, hanging there like cloud puffs, so big? You got to take photos and investigate them!
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Next attempt:
1. More ISO!!
2. Point the camera at something specific.
3. Take the dark shots at the end of the session rather than at the start.
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Except for the higher ISO. Taken from a city, high ISO digital photos do contain more light because the computer inside the camera thinks it's meaningful light and amplifies it.
But it isn't, really. It's just streetlights. Better not to be amplified. But when the camera computer did amplify it and saved it into the ARW-file, you have a hard time later to get rid of the unwanted light.
At 10 secs exposure you don't "waste" much time when playing around. So test your theory of higher ISO against the reality. Take a set of lights (and darks afterwards, yes!) of a piece of sky and let DSS to its thing with that set. Take another set of lights with ISO 1250 of the same piece of sky like in your test shots here (and a set of darks with the same ISO afterwards, yes!) and compare the result.
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QUESTION - what I see via a single raw shot is far... more detailed than the DSS result. This makes me suspect I'm not using DSS correctly, and that is where my issues lie.
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a) Your raw-file is almost perfect in terms of star trailing. 1 second less would have been great, I think. The stars are oval shaped, drooping down.
b) The stars aren't quite in focus. Is the lens capable of that at f/2? It might gain in sharpness at f/4, actually.
DSS discards blurry stars - and that's in your case most of the visible light dots. DSS also counts the stars and you get the option at the very end of the settings process to tell DSS to reduce the amount of stars to some value. Maybe you did that. I think it's a DSS default setting to reduce the amount of stars. But I'm not too sure. But in any case: blurry stars are being left out. You have a lot of them. Because the lens wasn't focussed precisely enough.
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As far as the star tracker - steady progress there.
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great project !