Hey Patrick, you beat me to it on responding to the gradient in the background (thanks for the catch).

I think it all sort of boils down to a few things.

1.)  The realistic sky in the atmosphere scene settings is actually pretty cool and can actually simulate a pretty big host of conditions.

2.)  While that's nice and all, what we as the artist community also would like is to control a lot of stuff even though it may not be realistic.  We want more controls for haze and fog and sky colors to be more under our control even though it might look or behave in a way which is not realistic.  We just want what we want.

That's why we call it art.  Art is an expression of what we are thinking about in our heads and we try to make things which we think look good even though it might not happen realistically.

So with all of that, it's important to remember that you can "cheat" stuff in C if you make your own skies and drop them into the background.  Another thing I've used are the primitives in the primivol collection from inagoni (or the advanced pack).

The haze/fog primitive produces some pretty spiffy volumetric stuff and the user options are also pretty nice.  If you combine "painting" your own skies and using the primivols, you can increase the dimensions of what's possible.

Just some ideas to think about.

-Kix