I’m only going to talk about technical things related to NLP and Lightroom and in this respect, the sky in the second image looks strange. A few weeks ago, a similar case (blown sky) was discussed - I cannot find the post though - and Nate’s recommendation was to crop the blown areas away before converting.
Also, changing pre-saturation can make your conversions look different. When I made my first serious steps with NLP, I wanted to see how the different conversion settings worked. So I took a shot of a negative, made 4 physical copies and 5 virtual copies and started converting to get this:
Vertical (red) copies of the shot
Horizontal conversions with pre-sat going from 1 to 5
Be aware that your mileage may wary. It may well be worth a) looking around the forum for other hints and b) making your own test series.