Since you asked...
While I like both of your images better than Mojosan's overall, those individual trees did bring to light a nagging issue with your original tree. While it's a visually appealing bonsai, it really doesn't look like a "tree". The extraneous deadwood that you removed in the virt makes me think that on some level you recognize that the original looks more like an interesting deadwood project than a real tree you might encounter in nature.
<understatement>Now I'm no expert</understatement> but I'm sure there are others here who could point out excellent examples of real-world trees that have a lot of surrounding deadwood that's not part of the trunk/branch structure of the main tree that might be composed in a similar manner to what you have here, but I think we'd find that it looks quite different than the deadwood on your tree. I would guess that it would mainly be an issue of scale.
So, in the end, I think the original image with some serious refinement of the deadwood could make a better overall composition, but as it stands now, the second image has a lot of potential on it's own and looks far more tree-like than the other.