Think about it hanging on a wall (Preferably matted and framed). If you go with the last one, you will essentially be hanging half an image since the botom part is near black. Compositionally, this is a serious mistake. It breaks the rules of composition with no benefit structurally, or aesthetically or in meaning.
I do like the darker foreground and lighter background. But imo you need to rethink the composition if you want to use the last one. Because if this is a juried exhibition, I think your technical achievement will be overwhelmed by the lack of fundamentals in the scoring process.
IN both cases there is no apparent reason to ignore the rules of thirds. And in the second image, the point of focus (the background), is treaded exactly equal to the foreground, which as I said is really dark. It does not make sense conceptually or compositionally.
By splitting the image in half it looks like you could not decide what you really wanted to focus on, so you focused on both.
