Just updating this thread. I've since spent 3 solid days working on the car.

Claying took a very long time. I used one clay bar on the roof alone.. it felt like sandpaper. There's definite clearcoat damage throughout all horizontal surfaces on the car, mainly the roof and hood. These will be not correctable via paint correction methods. I'll live with that. My main goal was to get the paint as good as possible for the age of the car, and for not knowing what the previous owner did (if anything at all).

These are resampled hi-res shots at 100 ISO with my XSi along with 100% crops.

First up is what the car looked like after the initial wash. This is pretty much what the entire car looked like, but even worse on certain areas.





You can imagine the time it takes to correct this. Refer to the before pic in post one for an even worse shot directly on top of the hood.

Here is after the heavy cutting. Major scratches and swirls are removed, but there is a haze on the whole car. If you look very closely, you can see the micro swirls created by the compounding with the wool pad.





Now the near finished product (as I'm still not completely finished - need to seal then treat the rest of the car). What you're seeing here is after an application of glaze. I used Wet Glaze 2.0. After what it's done, I love the stuff. It's better for darker cars than lighter, similar to PB Black Hole (which is also very good).