I like what I’ve done here. It even looks quite good, compared to a “real” HDR as seen on an HDR monitor. In HDR, the brightness of the sky dominates the image, turns the focus completely away from what I wanted to show.
You see, now that Lightroom partially supports HDR (even if the Internet doesn’t), I try how past images would look, if only I could use it.
The gist is: you can make every image look more “real”, but at the same time, especially if color detail in the highlights has not entirely been preserved, you enter a similar “uncanny valley” as we know it from computer games and human-like robots. The more real an image gets, the more disturbing even the finest differences get.