Part of what makes your model look so good is the lighting making it look like a very clean screencap from TOS.
May I ask how you are mimicking that lighting? You must be using more than one light source. I know that photographing the model to make it look like the familiar angles in TOS likely also involves adjusting the field of view (at least it does in SketchUp which I use).
I set up a simplistic lighting rig for the building of this model. And I just set them up to be just bright enough to make things visible.
Here's a little fun, including a tip of the hat to the first time we were supposed to see the USS Enterprise.
We actually got to see very little of the unlighted 11 footer as it was in "The Cage." There was the opening shot at the episode beginning and then the rest are of the shots are of the smaller miniature. Those shots were reused during TOS, but the remaining shots of a pilot version we see throughout the series are of the lighted 11 footer from WNMHGB. And I don't recall the blue dorsall being that noticeable.
You are correct. Datin's team delivered the 11 foot model very late. They had already shot all but one sequence with the 3 foot model. The from-under-the-saucer-over-the-top-into-the-bridge shot was the only one performed with the 11 foot model. Since we saw almost NOTHING else in The Menagerie, there was little actually preserved. Multiple film exposures along with the photo-chemical processing of the film gave way to a very washed out set of colors in what little remained. My model looks more like the filming model than what wound up ON film, that's for sure.