The difference in the lighting comes I think from the "artificial ambience" parameter. This parameter adds ambient light in the scene to compute GA, AO and GI, because these models need a lot of ambient lighting to give pleasing results, and create fake bounced light between objects. And the colour used is the one from the ambient light colour swatch, thus a light blue.
This parameter isn't taken into account for radiosity, because radiosity computes real bounced light, instead of this fake one.
I think the lighting is good in the new render, because it is outdoors after all, and this pale blue tint gives the impression of a hot sunny day.
And I think the shadows look better now.