However, suggesting i am a Professional Photographer does not suppose I know all of this.
Yes it does, at least around here. Claiming to be a professional photographer doesn't just say that's how you make your living. It implies a body of knowledge, a degree of proficiency, and otherwise unobtainable experience with common pitfalls in the practice. That's how your claim was received. It was received as an assurance that the judgment involved in analyzing the two photographs was properly informed and shouldn't be written off as a layman's error. And it was fairly apparent that's how you expected it to be received. Maybe you didn't, but that's the customary reason for prefacing one's opinion by stating a relevant professional qualification.
Around here, knowledge of the things I mentioned to jfb is expected of a professional photographer. What separates the amateur from the professional in terms of quality of work is that the latter knows about all the sources of failure, error, contamination, degradation, etc. in his work and takes steps to eliminate them. All that I mentioned falls under that category. The professional is expected to know a simple thing like an overblown contrast expansion simply amplifies noise. Heck, that was true even back in film days -- it just wasn't noise in a rasterized grid. Now I don't expect you blow a roll of 120 trying to shoot pictures of stars. But a professional photographer is expected to know enough about film to have some intuition for what should and shouldn't expose. Back in the day we didn't even have TTL light meters. We metered and bracketed and metered again and bracketed again. After a while you don't have to bracket so much because you came to know your equipment and supplies, and you got better at reading the environment. After a while, remembering rules like "sunny 16," a professional is expected to know right off the bat that specks in a contrast-expanded photograph from the 1960s can't possibly be stars.
Now I apologize if you were held to a standard you weren't ready to meet. But as far as your audience goes, all that I explained and more is indeed expected of someone who flies the flag of a professional in that field.
I hope we can move past this now, moot point.
Well, you've certainly taken your lumps over it and I think we'd all rather quit arguing in such a highly personalized form. Whether it remains as moot as it is now depends on how accurately and honestly you represent your level of understanding in future.