I enjoy this rendering. For me, photography is an artistic endeavor and I prefer, like you, something closer to reality but a little salt and pepper may help at times.

When I started in photography, lenses and films were not sharp and for many, sharpness was the goal. That history informs my expectations today. If you start with sharp, you can always soften. The reverse is very much harder to obtain.

In your picture, I suspect the lack of sharpness is due to the flower being slightly out of focus. If your hand were unsteady or the flower were moving in the breeze, you would see motion blur instead. I did not look at the metadata so I am only guessing. By the way, working in the shade as you likely did here produces nicer results than direct sun. You might also want to experiment with bracketing your exposures.

I know I have posted a great many flower photos in the past few weeks. This is another but with a twist. I wanted to show just a taste of what can be done with Affinity and also a glimpse of what goes into a finished flower shot.

The first picture is my finished product and the second is a jpg created from raw with only the most basic of adjustments to brightness. The second flower did not add to the image in any way. I tried cloning it out but it didn't come out well. Instead, I copied the blossom to a new layer by itself. I also copied the
leaf directly below the flower to a new layer. I then duplicated the leaf layer. I was able to move, stretch and rotate the two leaves to cover all the lower flower. I then placed the blossom layer on top to tie everything together. After merging the layers into a single image layer, I proceeded to crop and do a few more basic adjustments. As a very last step I used NIK Color Efexs for final touch up but the change was minimal.