As someone "on the other side ;-)", I don't think you protected much. UPX is pretty much the classic "Hello World" of unpacking manually, and tools like PEid will still be able to tell it's UPX from the decompressor stub alone.

It's been years since I unpacked a UPX manually, but I still remember what it looks like: a PUSHA at the start to save all the registers, a lot of decompression code, and finally a POPA and a JMP to the OEP. Incidentally this general pattern is also shared by a bunch of other simple packers (more focused on compression than anti-RE) so unpacking them follows the same process.