Thanks for a full reply, and a lesson in why thinking about aperture is sensible with landscapes.

With the original, it felt right (or at least acceptable) for the sharpness to fade away, and you had the foreground sharp - though sweetspots, and plenty of light do suggest there were better settings.

The roadway definitely doesn’t work well (as you say) because of the out of focus fence on the far left where the mind goes “That’s close, it should be sharp”.

With the transformers - less obviously an issue, but I think with such a complex scene, maximum sharpness across the subject is for the best, and I can well imagine there’s a better choice of aperture to get more of it crisp.

Of course, I’m hardly the best to comment - my joy is wild birds, where there’s rarely enough light, and the birds are usually far enough away that DOF covers them all: thus my f setting is almost always as low as possible.