you use a very aggressive palette - I can't see the quality of stitching
I just managed to take a set of pictures for a pano that spit out a level span of 10460 - 31429.
If I clip out the heaters it does not crush it out so much.
some ideas:
(1) sometimes I also clipped out some hot spots (lamps)
i.e.
convert flirraw.png -level 16000,30000 tilexy.png
-> convert flirraw.png -level 16000,20000 tilexy.png
but you lost the informations
(2) untested: change (+/-)gamma like (+/-)level and move the lamps in a nonlinear range
(a) convert raw.png
-level 13000,
30000 -gamma 3 tilexy.png
(b) stitch tiles with ICE version 2
(c) convert pano.png
+level 13000,30000
+gamma 3 ready.png
(3) use old ICE