Understood, thanks Roman. I really like your edit of this image. The sky is especially nice.

Re the lighting issues - It seems to me that the relatively darker area there on the right helps balance out the very bright sky above and upper left. If one darkens that area too much, it's blackness dominates over the sky. If it's too light, the sky dominates.

The shadow areas in the unedited conversion from RAW provide a reference for preserving that balance which, from a workflow perspective, is the kind of thing that must be done before any other color or detail work.

I guess it begs the question about whether it really matters to preserve the original light/shadow relationship (this gets into luminosity) or not. The only reason I think it is, is that in this case (and in any outdoor sun-lit scene), the brain will attempt to apply it's understanding of what the scene should look like and constantly stop to fill in the blanks. So it affects the ability of the image to really capture a viewer's attention.

Otherwise, like if the image was ultimately meant to be an artistic interpretation, then breaking rules is what it's all about.

Am I off base by thinking in this way?

Also of interest is how different the various editing paths are - not a lot of duplication, which confirms what we all know - that Photoshop is one deep,deep program with numerous good ways to do any one thing.

Hey, this is a lot of fun!