My guess is that it's still significantly a settings issue. There's several settings I found in ffmpeg back when I was playing with it that _drastically_ improved the overall bitrate.
One simple thing to do is using a constant quantizer instead of aiming for a target bitrate, and then tweaking it until you end up at a bitrate you're comfortable with. I found it offered generally better quality for the bitrate (for me) than even two-pass encoding with a target bitrate.