Very nice work!

However, i'm puzzled. I see you favor masking/airbrushing, of which takes a ton of prep for each color. And you end up painting areas that don't necessarily need paint. Why would you not match the color that's there and paint the wear spots with a hand brush?

That wasn’t my goal. Honest question.

I’ve used the frisket/airbrush method for white under plastics. In this case, I want the white brighter, so the airbrush makes sense.

In some colors that are a pain to match (like grays) it can make sense to paint the entire area.

You're not thinning out your paint enough then. Mix enough water in so when your brush touches the surface, the paint flattens out. If it doesn't, it's too thick and you will get brush marks.

I said in my post above: painting the entire area is sometimes needed. Faded color, lots of damage or ball swirls and difficult to match colors.