Lacquer wet sanding and buffing question

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to produce as near to flawless gloss finish, and have found it to be by far the most challenging aspect of the building process. I'm first level sanding with p1200, then p1500, p2000, and p,2500. I then give the ukulele a once over with an abralon 4000 pad. Start to finish, to sand the neck and body ready for buffing takes me about 6 hours. Is this a reasonable amount of time? I'm not looking for shortcuts that sacrifices quality, but all that sanding gets awfully tedious.

For buffing, I'm using the large stewmac wheels turning at about an 800rpm arbor speed. I first use menzerna gw16, then menzerna p175 super fine finish. My problem is that I don't understand how much compound should be applied to the wheel, how often it should be applied. I often get little dots of compound left on the surface that seemingly show up at random. I would guess this is a sign of too much compound?

I level sand first with 1000 Mirka papers with a hard rubber block followed by 1000 then 2000 Abralon, wet, with a RO sander. I stopped using the Menzerna sticks for the reason you mentioned and now use the StewMac Color Tone abrasives, medium and fine on a flannel wheel and domet wheel respectively.