splendid that you got it , was gonna say you are barking up the wrong tree with align particle by force or whatever compound that was - it may have been using the velocity vector. It was also a bit cruel of Daniel to leave you overnight stewing like that but to be kind, in order for you to learn, sometimes one needs to be cruel
Ive been using ICE since beta and I still dont fully understand rotations or quaternions or the merits of splitting rotation up into quaternion or axis and angle or euler or rotation by orientation... its not exactly crystal clear on how to do this anyways with so many options and ways to connect and sometimes the factory align compounds don't behave as expected either!

but here is how I approached the problem. I knew I had to globally align to a position (the centre) then I had to rotate or tilt each particle around their axis locally. breaking it into 2 stages helped to try out various solutions and get each part working then it was just a matter of joining the two. heres my compound and screenshot, don't download unless you have solved it already!
this has got quite a bit of usage for those Motion Graphics folks too as you can alter the tilt by distance to null so the flower petals open and close - a bit like your reference picture where there is more tilt the further from centre
