I would have liked to take a photo with just the stars (no trails) and moonlit mountain, but, with the short exposure time required to avoid motion blurring of the stars at 100mm, this just wasn't possible. Also, a shot of the Milky Way at 100mm is somewhat less impressive than a wider vista taken at, say, 21mm.
In any case, the shot was never about the star trails - it was about the moonlit mountain. The trails, running in the direction that they are, were intended as a tool to help frame the mountain and provide balance to the shot (instead of a more-or-less detailless sky, as would have been the case if I had skipped the first 44 minutes prior to moonrise, then just exposed the moonlit mountain), rather than being the subject of the shot in their own right.
Also, this shot was taken in early 2009 - there seems to have been a proliferation of star trails shots since then, often with no point of interest other than the trails themselves, which has made star trails rather 'cliche' since then...