decibel,

"trying .. for years to try and get that painterly look"
it treats everything the same and so important details get more processing than they should"

IMO you see problems where none exists .
You completly disregard the last and  most important thing.

When you are done with your carefully painterly version, done by a COMBINATION of scripts and manual hands on, working on seperate layers at a time, then you place you painterly version over the orginal and mask it. Then by alternating with the black and white brush you make the details sharp where they should be sharp.

Edit: To make an image painterly doesn't take more than a day or two. Compare that to the months it took for some of the old painters to finish a painting..