The lesson here is that if you have to spend a lot of time editing a photo, it’s probably not very good. A sunset photo is less about the sun than the clouds. Assume everything else is black. The palm tree silhouette is the classic sunset photo. Your ground plane isn’t doing much to help a boring sunset.
Of course, you can’t always predict a great sunset. You wait to see what happens. Sometimes the sun drops into the haze and you get nothing, other times the sun colors the clouds before and after sunset. Be prepared to launch 2 or 3 times to capture the evolution.
In this clip, the sky after sunset is set off by reflection, silhouette and parallax effect moving through the trees. Ignore the jerky movement, it’s an old clip from a P3.