Reviewing Old Data

I'm in the process of doing an inventory of a bunch of old drives.  I probably have about 15 old drives that date back to the late 90's. After learning how to use PixInsight, I was always planning to go back to have a second go at some data sets including the M81/82 shot I posted back in April 2015. 

I was never happy with that shot as it became "cartoony" and fuzzy-wuzzy for lack of better terms.  As I was looking at individual frames, I noticed there was definitely a loss of small details in M81.   In the better shots of M81, there's a kind of faint three-fingered "scratch" across the arms, near the core.   

Here's an example from a random person on Astrobin:

https://www.astrobin.com/full/rnu5hd/0/?nc=user

But in my result that's missing.  I think I was really trying to tease out the IFN nebulosity so much that I ended up pushing the processing so that smaller, delicate details just got lost.  Fuzzy wuzzy indeed.

[Couple points before I forget: My subs were 600 seconds on the Canon T3i.  That's too long.  Before I even stretched the image, I could see the core of M81 was blown out.  I think 360 seconds would have been perfect but with the same total amount of hours.  As I embark upon future projects on CMOS cameras, I think I need to be closer to 3-4 minutes for subs at F6-7.]

[Also: I need to do a much better job at noting WHICH TELESCOPE I'm using on subs.  It's obvious I switched telescopes on a couple nights but I don't think I ended up taking flats on one or both of those nights!   

I think the blame here is that sometimes, I'll engage essentially in "sight seeing" so I'll take an hour's worth of data on a random target just to see.   For example, I have an hour on NGC253 and an hour on NGC6888 but it doesn't look like I took flats.  I think a lot of folks do this because it's fun, but I'm not here to make friends.....  :/]