Trying to edit bad pictures into good pictures

These are the times when you need a good photo editor looking over your shoulder, like a veteran surgeon at the E.R.:
"Doctor, you've done all you can. There's nothing else we can do. Call it."
"You call it!"
I do this way too often; invariably after an hour in Photoshop I realize the only thing I could have done was to take it correctly in the first place. Here are a few examples from recent history.

This is just an extreme crop of a vertical shot, at night, in the dark, at high-ISO. It's not an abomination, but the quality suffers from the crop, and I think its actually a bit over-exposed - isolating the highlights in the globes turns the rest of the scene black and we'd still get the light on the guy's face.

Thought motion blur would be a nice effect here, sort of echo their movements... instead it just looks like muck. This scene was so dynamic I kept coming back to it to try to make it look more like it did at the time, but it was a lost cause. A risk that didn't pay off.

Still like this idea, but the execution is off here. Letting the TV/LCD light be the only source isn't working, it needs more fill. Also, I apparently don't know how to iron a sheet. Gotta give this another go sometime, synchronizing all of it is a hell of a deal though - those iphone screens turn off or dim automatically no matter what settings they are on.