Ok. I've run the shader test like 10 times and I did what JibbSmart and painkiller said about isolating the faces. Now I get what Jibb meant about the smooth shades. They vanished after the isolation. The lighting looks pretty good now. In fact, it would be perfect, better yet than xNormal, if it weren't for the darn direction.
After intensively rotating the object in every possible way and position, I came to notice that the parallax left-right scrolling corresponds to tilting instead of panning and vice-versa -- when panning the object, the texture is scrolled vertically.
I took a look inside the .fx and I understand about 10%. I discovered where to edit the strength of the effect but I can't locate the pan and tilt thing, no matter what.