I do know that people have been 'frightened off' by PI's less than conventional GUI
Deep down, the biggest difference in the UI is that PI uses an object-oriented user interface (OOUI) while most applications use a "modal oriented" user interface. In a modal interface, usually when you pull a dialog box to do something, the entire application waits until you're done with it and click one of the famous OK, CANCEL and sometimes APPLY buttons. No such thing on an OOUI. People used to modal interfaces may find this confusing, but once you get used to it, at least in my experience, you become a lot more productive (and for some odd reason I also find it more fun to use).
Anyway, back to the problem at hand, like I said, if the problem is that a MT dims the core of the stars, you can try this - which I mentioned earlier but I'll break it down a bit:
1) After your MT, use the ATWT tool, select only layer 1, 2 or both, deselecting all others, increase bias to 0.100 or maybe 0.200 for the active layers, and apply. You may also want to check Noise reduction. Just play with all these parameters (bias, NR) on a magnified preview to see the effect of using different values. You could do this while a star mask is being applied to the image, to isolate the effect on stars as opposed to, maybe, noise.
OR...
2) Before your MT, create a dup of the image, use the ATWT tool, select only layer 1, 2 or both, and apply over this duplicate image. Do your MT on the original image, and when you're done, add both images together using PixelMath with something like Max(image,dup)...
Just two ways out of many to deal with this issue. It's a start, one can certainly get fancier than that, but this might get you a bit more familiar with these tools and situations in which you can use them... Before you know it, you might even start to come up with your own way of doing things...
