Thanks for the help Aussie Driver! Since I had some shine on it from the repeated white polishing compound applications, I decided to forgo the SSR3 type-abrasive stuff and start over with the gloss restorer (their version of SSR2.5) and go from there.

I got a nice shine out of it now, but it does appear a little bit orange peely. Peely, but uniformly shiny....it's wierd and hard to describe. It still looks good, but not as good as your the finish in your picture does. Does this mean that I.....

A. Didn't wet sand thoroughly/uniformly enough?

B. Didn't thin the paint out enough with the mineral spirits?

C. Wound up with the peel effect from allowing the millions of bubbles to pop on their own as the paint self leveled?

In short, what did I do wrong and how can I get avoid this with the next panel I do? I really think it was caused by "C", but shouldn't it have been fixed by "A"?

Also, is there any reason I can't dry sand with a random orbit sander in between coats as opposed to wet sanding? I would think a machine would make knock down the high spots more uniformly than doing it by hand.