Sorry about your Oriental.
It seemed to me like both airplanes were very noisy. What sort of mufflers?
Most ARF's have rather soft engine mounts. If you can spread the load with a larger slab of aluminum under the lugs and similar on the other side, with elastic lock nuts, that could help a lot.
Cheap spinners made in China are generally a bad bargain, some machined from castings and prone to split and do bad stuff like that. Try a Tru-Turn, Dave Brown, Brodak or Randy Aero spinner. Worth the money, each & every one of them.
I hate Zinger propellers, but since they're OOB, then most anything else will be better. Try a Xoar 12-4 or APC 11.5 x 4 or 12-4. Don't worry about the weight of the prop too much.
Mufflers...I'm not a fan of "tongue mufflers". The stock OS mufflers work really well, but yes, they're heavy. Randy Aero (aka Randy Smith) sells excellent CNC Tube Mufflers. If you have trouble with vibrations and stuff is shaking loose, disconnect the muffler pressure until you get the vibration under control. Adding a bit to tailweight to adjust the CG is not a big deal. A quieter engine seems slower to the pilot (you) and you will find it more relaxing and easier to think while doing the tricks as you learn the newer ones. Good things!
Your basic flying skills look to be pretty good. Are you flying Beginner or Intermediate? Since you can fly inverted, I'll encourage entering Intermediate, even if you can't do all the tricks. Work on the rest of the tricks one at a time. Being able to do them is more a matter of airplane trim...and "dry flying". My wife was giving me flak for doing that just today, while I was watching the Sprint Cup race. Or maybe it was the Camping World truck race? Anyway, that's the way it will always be. <sigh>
Remember that the triangles are supposed to have equal sides and angles. Mathematically not possible, but that's the general idea as presented in the rulebook. Make everything big now, smaller later. Easier said than done...
Steve