Nice job there John,
with your stars normally the issue with the bloat comes from the actual processing of the image in my experience. When your really pushing the data to bring out the faint whispy's you also bring out the faint halo in the stars that ends up not being that faint at the end.
I have never used AA4 though I do use adobe PSCS5 but I would think they have the same options when looking at linear and non linear stretching, eg, Levels and Curves. The one thing also that PS has is Shadows and high lights, in this little filter you can really bring the stars back to a tolerable size even after stretching as it grabs all the highlights (stars and bright parts of the nebula) and suppresses them (virtually doing a non linear curves only in the upper end of the histogram). And then if it kills your nebula too much, just Layer mask the area back to its original brightness.
Other than that I really like the colours though a little bit of noise control could be introduced I'd say in the 0III channel to smoothen up the image.
Good luck
Brendan
