I hear you. I'm not a big fan of using every possible effect on an image to get some bright streaky kind of thing. But I do like my sigs to be of a decent size, like at least 250 wide.
That is kinda dark. Maybe you could fiddle around with this or this?
That's very nice if you. I like what you've done to the avatar, but the sig seems more like an oversized avatar. The image isn't too low of a quality to do bigger, is it?