Thanks ATR. I still want to try the darkening technique as a potential fix but was not confident on how I would follow up with the sharpen tool, in terms of settings, since I never used that before. I will create a new project name vefore playing around so i can easily revert back.
The weird thing is that the splotching seems to also appear on some scenes where I did not mess with the color but was using neat video plugin . and I got this strange warning message about neat video not geting applied to the whole screen in 1080 and still proceeding. (neat video does not display any warning messages for hd 720, only 1080. I am wondering if that somehow played a role as well. It's kinda hard for me to reset the color changes becasue I am not sure which version it initially was applied. (I did a few rounds of importing and exporting on this project)
Thanks!