Too sharp or not too sharp?

I have a couple of versions of this image. What I did with this is that I lightened it quite a bit using the curves application in PS. (It's no secret I "manipulate" images in PS :). However I do try to replicate the original scene as much as I can remember. A problem I used to have was that I would frequently make my images too dark. This was especially noticeable when I would print the image. Alain Briot would quite often admonish his students to make prints lighter. This image, for whatever reason has a painterly quality to it. I took it with my Nikon D700, and it seems that this camera does produce images that do exhibit this quality. I love this image, and I never get tired of looking at it. I think one reason it seems to look painterly is that the leaves and branches were not "frozen" with a fast shutter speed. The light quality was excellent when I shot this, late in the afternoon. The image also looks better when viewed from a distance, rather than close up, as most pixel peepers like to do. This is one thing I notice, that these so-called pixel peepers like to get their noses right up to the image, and then complain that the image is not sharp. Sometimes I don't want it sharp.