What's wrong with my photographs?

Hey, thanks again for the feedback, guys!

It was taught to me a long time ago that great art is often polarizing. Bad art get's a normal reaction from everyone. I look at Gurskie's work and wonder, WTF is this crap? Others look at it and open their wallets for millions of dollars.

I think the haloing is from Smugmug's processing of my shots. It doesn't exist in CS6. I agree, it looks bad. Happens to most high contrast hard edges in my uploaded shots.

I posted this on DPR to get some raw feedback. I honestly wasn't looking for a pat on the back or praise, because, well, this is DPR! LoL If I wanted to have my ego stroked, I would have posted elsewhere!

What's funny, is that negative feedback I get on here actually differs from the negative feedback I get elsewhere and through emails. I purposely kept that info out of this thread to see how it all compared.