Both are visually pleasing images Leon.
Data has been stretched a little harder to bring out more stars, but at the expense of detail.
Why not bring out the best in both images – stars and nebulosity. Register the two images so they are the same scale. Load both into PS. Make the crop-retry.jpg the background layer. Load crop-retry-filtered.jpg and paste onto the crop-retry to create the new layer. Make the new layer blend lighten mode and stretch it a little more. Duplicate the base layer and make it multiply blend mode to restore some details lost it the previous lighten mode stretch. Finally duplicate the base layer again and place at the top of the layer stack. Boost the saturation and modify the red channel curve (rather heavily), then change the blend mode to soft light. Tweak opacities to taste. You could re-layer again to focus on star colours if required. My rendition is hindered by jpeg artifacts, but gets the point across in a crude way.