I have been getting good results shooting hard and then using photoshop to reduce the noise. Also attaching a polarizer reduces haze by a good margin. So much so that i feel polarizing filters are a must for AP when you have the skyline exsposed. Average metering and spot metering have been almost useless for me, try the center average and see if you get more consistant exsposures.
Reducing the noise in photoshop to much is bad for print so a little noise is ok, you dont want it to look like a painting unless thats the effect you want. Sometimes this effect for an AP image is pretty cool.
About the hard setting, i first started trying this based on file size, the hard images were always larger. More information has gotta be a good thing, and photoshop seems like it does a better job at noise reduction than the algorithm on the FC200.
Composition is always something to think about, this is where we have a huge advantage over full scale AP. Say your shooting a large farm or something. Instead have just going up really high and getting the property in frame on one shot. Try to move around, maybe take a shot from a tree top, so the bottom of the image is a nicely exposed tree top etc. Look for natural lines that lead into your subject we can change positions in the sky so fast it would be a waste not to search around for natrual s curves and lines.