My first attempt with RAW

I've always been happy with JPEGs but I thought I would give raw files a go to see if I could do anything about fringing and CA. Here's an OOC JPEG which looks good to me but has some fringing:

I have the in-camera JPEG settings fairly neutral so I was expecting the raw file to look similar to the picture above, but when I opened it came out looking very flat and dark. I cleaned up the fringing as best I could in ucraw (a very small amount of lateral CA adjustment). Anyway, both before and after the fringing correction the raw image was very dark and flat. I applied the auto exposure correction in ucraw (+0.8EV?) which brightened it up a bit, but the colours were still very flat compared to the OOC image. I played with contrast and saturation and the best result I could get was this:

Aaargh! Now the details in the tree are gone and it looks even weirder. I don't know if I've gotten rid of the fringing so much as changed the sky to the same colour.

Any ideas why the raw file came out so dark and flat initially, or any helpful suggestions for a first time raw tinkerer?