I agree that there are trade-offs with retinex (as with any other tool), and of course the result is also a matter of taste. I was trying to do this with retinex, as I took your question as an excuse to learn (by experimenting) about it myself 
FWIW, I usually do this kind of processing with the tone-mapping tool, not with retinex. Though I’m not guaranteeing that you will like the result any more than my previous attempt 
tonemapping.pp3 (10.1 KB)