First: Thank you, thank you! High praise, indeed, from the likes of you guys! So glad to hear hours of study and gigs of practice pleases more just than me.
Ross, the greyscale layer tip will be used alot now, thank you (I remember reading something similar in one of Mateo's tuts, but promptly forgot about it: which happens a lot lately...more each year :`) I haven't had time to play with it much, but here's a start...I put another "hot" color layer under the greyscale, then erased out the grey layer to intensify, and erased out the top transparent color layer to diminish. The result (I think...?) is a control of the atmospheric perspective, without dulling the vibrancy, like I've never had before:
image1-mix
image2-mix
before
after-mix