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"Whaling is no longer carried out in Australia and actively
discouraged by so called "Whaling nations". "

I would hope whaling would not only be discouraged but banned as
well!

(I think we are up to about identity 65..)

"Taken while standing under the old flencing* deck of the original
Tangalooma whaling station."
They probably misspell it on the tourist literature, so you are
excused - but the correct spelling is "flensing".  (I used to work at
a marine science centre near a former whaling town..)

"This was the scene (slightly modified) used as the back drop for some
Sunset wedding portraits using a 24 - 70 lens."
Fascinating.  How that scene could transmogrify into a Sunset (must we
use capitals?) scene has me intrigued.  Me?  I would have shot it
at... Sunset!  Fancy that!

"This scene from a camera RAW file was first developed with Adobe
LightRoom (to recover the highlight clouds)"
Hmm.  Those clouds still look rather burnt...  But they are hardly
important, so who cares, right?  But the large glary area to the right
of middle is very distracting - it doesn't match the intensity of the
other cloud formations and looks very out of place.

"and then processed further in Photoshop to expand the dynamic range"
Too much, imo.  You alluded to it yourself, HDR is EASY to overuse.
The scene looks vaguely unreal.

"and correct perspective distortion. Approximately 18% of the scene
was lost during this distortion correction."
EIGHTEEN PERCENT??  How bad is that lens???  Looks to me like you were
shooting not that far above horizontal, and not at a hugely wide
angle, so what little perspective distortion you would have had (on
any reasonable lens) should have been very easy to correct.  Somewhere
in the process you seem to have introduced a weird bowing of the
horizon, which is noticably lowest just to the right of the third
palm..  Hint - everybody will probably accept bent palm trees, but
bent horizons are not a good thing..

"I am in two minds about DR expansion although it does produce detail
in a range > not normally possible."
Clearly you are right to have this attitude - a fine demonstration,
from which we will all learn to do it better.  (O;