I'm glad you had a good time. I know you have been building up to this for a while now. I always feel like my photos don't look any better after I do processing to them. Maybe because my phone does the processing on the front end or something. Who knows. That being said, I'd like to play around with some of the editing tools more, I just don't know if it would make a difference.
The phone processing can be pretty harsh. These days, a lot of the in-camera processing is too much. It seems all made for social media on phones, rather than printing.
The event was interesting. Not my crowd for the most part, but a good experience.
I guess they probably all vary a bit.