By the looks of it you had bad seeing and have really tried to compensate with sharpening..? I'm with you though, I prefer to see the finer scale detail with a bit of noise than less fine scale structure and a supersmooth image, if the image is too smooth it kinda looks out of focus and I always wonder if some of the faint structures have been smooth out..?
Seems you and I are the only imagers left that happily avoid the super smooth look when it comes to processing, bet you have the good'ol film days in your memory too..?
Push your data, push your data, push your data...woot, woot, long live fine scale noise in images
Mike