Hmmmmm... so the probe was not made from several exposures as you should when making hdr?  taking ths into hdrshop to look at myself.

Also trying to understand the relationship between "IBL contrast" & the resultant image when working with HDR IBLs.
It's September, so school is back in session smile

It looks like it was slightly overexposed latitude/longitude image transformed to angular map. When I stop up & down, I don't get the balanced color image that you have from proper correction. So did they (e-frontier) generate a proper HDR image? The renders seem to have more light information illuminating the scenes than a similar LDRI IBL angular map