Here are some thoughts that come to me as I look at this photo and read the discussion:
• Make the subject the subject. The thing that grabbed you about this particular scene was the icicles on the branch. When something that detailed and small is your subject, you need to work extra hard to clearly lead the eye to it. That is most easily done (and perhaps, best done) by zooming in. I use my 55-200mm lens for these types of photos, and usually zoom in all the way to 200mm. If you don’t have a zoom lens, then “zoom with your feet”, as @jamesstaddon says, and get in as close as you can with whatever lens you do have.
If you can’t zoom in further, try to find shapes to bring out in the photo. That’s what I attempted to do when I took the photo attached below, using the sun and the shapes of the branches to try to bring order to the photo. Not sure if it worked optimally, but it’s an example. 🙂
• Don’t leave to editing what you can fix while shooting. You can do a ton of editing to try and salvage a “bad” picture, and in the end, it’s still a “bad” picture. Instead of relying too heavily on editing, do your best to evaluate the photo right when you take it, and see what you can do to take a better one right then and there. Of course, I realize you can’t always tell in-camera how great a picture will turn out, but take the time to do the work of making the picture as best as you can while you’re shooting so you don’t have to edit out everything later when some of those things could have been fixed in the first place. (Spoken from experience!)
Keep trying! Winter’s not over yet! 🙂
