Best results on Youtube - WMV format does well

I was helping my friend "Walnut the Clown" publish a band performance on his Youtube channel.
'The Amazing Frank E. Evans Band plays "Red Red Robin"'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpag4VA3yMI
We had problems with the video looking bad compared to our usual Youtube results. We deleted it, tried rendering different ways then uploading again - 4 times before we got an acceptable result, and that success is a little bit of a surprise being the Microsoft WMV format.
Our earlier efforts were:
1. MPEG-2, DVD-PAL format. MPEG-2 is one of Youtube's officially recommended formats and it seemed like a good idea to have one render cover both DVD and Youtube publication. .... er no!
2. DIVX format. This has been successful for us in the past but this time ... er no!
3. XVID format. Seemed better than DIVX for this clip, probably acceptable, but WMV was better.
4. WMV format. Our widescreen original render output set at 720 x 404 pixels, 30 frames per second progressive from PAL 50i original footage, bitrate 3500 kbps average VBR video with keyframe interval of 2 sec plus keyframes on cue and edit points and 192 kbps audio. This 3.5 minute clip came out to about 85 Meg.

The only reason I even thought to try WMV was that "Walnut" had uploaded some WMV videos he had edited in "Windows Movie Maker" and they look good - for example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpVC7utjMnY

The surprise here is that articles I have read and people I have talked to have said that WMV does not work well with Youtube. These results tell a different story!

Walnut's channel - Comedy and Music:Nostalgia, Vintage, World, Folk, Jazz, Swing
http://www.youtube.com/user/walnuttheclown