I consider the light pollution here to be bad. Using the examples on the astrobin site for the Bortle Dark-Sky Scale, I estimate around 7 (perhaps 6 if I was generous) - not the worst, but bad enough. I can generally walk around the back yard at night without the need of a torch and have little fear of tripping over anything.
At the moment, I use DSS to process the raw images and stack them. I then import the 32 bit tiff into PS and work on it from there. I like the darkness on your processed image (I went through that at one point), but I feel it loses some of the details when doing it, hence I backed off a bit. If you look at other images out on the net, they're generally wider field of view than mine and the nebula extends further. I think some of those fainter areas would come out more with further subs.
I have found that I'm having to adjust the colour in processing, moving away from green/yellow towards red/blue. I try not to push it too far, but it's possible I could have done more with this - so I'll have another go at it again. ...time passes... Just did some more experimentation. Looks like there's more to go.
I am procrastinating, but I will eventually purchase Pixinsight and do my processing that way. I had a trial and could see it would work well, but I've just been resisting that learning curve for now.
PM me to work out how I can get a 21 Mb Canon RAW file to you for the unprocessed sub.