I like it but I don't use it all the time. HDR allows me to take a photo how I see it with my eyes. That sunset was absolutely beautiful and without HDR, either the sky or the ground would be overly bright or underly dark. I am not one to put crazy filters on the HDR or make it look overly crazy. This picture captures how I saw the sunset when I wasn't looking through the camera lens
Good lord.. if that photo is how you actually saw that sunset, I need to start taking some of whatever made you see this (hope you didn't have to drive anywhere) ... that with a little Paranoid by Black Sabbath playing in the background - paradise!! (Oh wowww, man .. the COLORS)
On a more serious note; with the advent of the 1020, an HDR program showed up in the store that I thought was well worth the money - HDR Photo Camera. You can customize the bracketing; the alignment is 100% perfect, and then when you go to the edit page, they have a number of HDR presets - so like your sunset you can goof around with tone mapping presets for some interesting effects - but they also have a "None" preset that is very conservative - just a flattened combination of the 3 photos to give you as close to what you see with your naked eye as possible. I use both - the one for artistry, the other for accurate depictions.. I think it's well worth the 2 or 3 dollars they charge for it and I use it quite a bit.
NICE photo by the way!!