How can I threshold this blurry image to make the digits as clear as possible?

In a previous post, I tried adaptively thresholding a blurry image (left), which resulted in distorted and disconnected digits (right):

Since then, I've tried using a morphological closing operation as described in this post to make the brightness of the image uniform:

If I adaptively threshold this image, I don't get significantly better results. However, because the brightness is approximately uniform, I can now use an ordinary threshold:

This is a lot better than before, but I have two problems:

1. I had to manually choose the threshold value. Although the closing operation results in uniform brightness, the level of brightness might be different for other images.
2. Different parts of the image would do better with slight variations in the threshold level. For instance, the 9 and 7 in the top left come out partially faded and should have a lower threshold, while some of the 6s have fused into 8s and should have a higher threshold.

I thought that going back to an adaptive threshold, but with a very large block size (1/9th of the image) would solve both problems. Instead, I end up with a weird "halo effect" where the centre of the image is a lot brighter, but the edges are about the same as the normally-thresholded image:

Edit: remi suggested morphologically opening the thresholded image at the top right of this post. This doesn't work too well. Using elliptical kernels, only a 3x3 is small enough to avoid obliterating the image entirely, and even then there are significant breakages in the digits: