I certainly appreciate everyone's good advice in this thread. It's helped me a lot. I've done test after test, however, and I still can't get anything that looks as good as just hand-brushing thin coats with a foam brush. So I think for this model I'm just going to have to live with that -- and save the spraying for the next model.

The choice seems to boil down to either speckles or brush strokes. For a WWI model I'll take brush strokes.