Meeeeh.. so, so....
be nice to remove those gradients of course but as you say the light gathering capability shows promise for sure! The image scale is showing its advantage too, both this and the NGC 253 show real fine body. I assume that's the full field? If so the correction is perfect and any image tilt is insignificant, nice!
Hmmmm..you look to have just lassood that outer arm and the galaxy and brightened them though, this is always tempting to do but it isn't real. No way of telling what might be a tidal stream and what is just gradient, would be hard to remove the gradients without removing the tidal stream though..?
Overall very promising!
Mike