/3/ - 3DCG

I've been toying around with a waterpark scene using assets made for poser. I've applied the iray uber base to it all and replaced the water with an iray texture from JG. I imagine the are equivilent improvements I can do to the other parts of the scene.
Though what's bohering me the most is the lighting. It's currently set mostly to default from a beach scene HDRi. If i lower the exposure, things get washed out. If I increase dome brightness, the sky no longer has detail.
Any suggestions?
I feel like applying the uber shader to the geometry should have assisted with light bounce, or is that a seperate setting I need to tweak on per surface basis?