The cladding is the whole argument
Where the sheet is Alclad, the bright surface is a thin layer of high-purity aluminium rolled onto an alloy that corrodes readily. 2024-T3 is copper-bearing and needs the protection. That cladding is about two to five percent of the sheet thickness, and it is not cosmetic. It is the corrosion protection for the panel underneath it. Polishing is metal removal carried out gently and repeatedly, and aggressive or repeated polishing goes through it. Once through, the base alloy is open to air and water, and nothing puts the cladding back. That single fact is why this is not a matter of taste. Taste decides what you want the aircraft to look like. The cladding decides how many more years you can have it looking that way.
Polish removes the protection it is polishing
Aluminium defends itself by oxidizing. The film that forms passivates the surface and slows further attack, and it is dull, which is exactly what polishing takes off. A polished airframe is therefore a surface continually stripped of its own protection and left to grow it back. That is why polished aircraft need recurring attention rather than occasional attention, and why polishing is more labour over the life of the airframe than paint is. Nobody chooses polished alloy to reduce work. They choose it because it looks like nothing else on the ramp, and that is a sound reason as long as it is the actual reason and the schedule is funded to match.
Paint is the opposite trade
Paint is a one-off event with a defined life. Manufacturers recommend strip and repaint every five to six years, common practice runs closer to seven, ten is about the outside limit, and roughly four years is realistic where the aircraft lives in coastal salt air. A modern basecoat/clearcoat system builds a clearcoat of around 2.0 to 2.5 mils dry film thickness and carries 15 to 25 percent less painted weight than a direct-gloss finish. What you get is a real barrier instead of an oxide film. Composite panels are the fussy part. They flex, they want film thickness held within tight limits, and a poor application can crack or etch within a year of going on.
The failure mode is drift, not choice
Almost nobody decides to neglect polished brightwork. They inherit it, keep it going for a season or two, then let the interval stretch when the diary fills. The result is the worst of both outcomes: an airframe that reads as neglected to every passenger who walks up to it, and cladding still being spent each time someone finally catches up with a heavy pass. Deferring paint fails the same way from the other direction. Old paint hides the corrosion working underneath it, so the repaint you postponed becomes a structural repair you did not budget for. FAA AC 43-4B is explicit that corrosion inspection and treatment sit with the operator, on the manufacturer's recommendations or your own program.
A fast mirror and a maintained polish are different products
There are two ways to get a mirror, and they are not the same job done to two standards. One is heavy abrasive and speed: a crew, a day, a surface that looks superb by the evening, bought by taking cladding. The other is staged work through progressively finer abrasives with compounds qualified to Boeing D6-17487, followed by shorter maintenance passes at interval that hold the finish while removing far less material. Boeing's qualification battery is the checkable part. It includes sandwich corrosion testing against faying aluminium surfaces and hydrogen embrittlement testing to ASTM F519, four notched cadmium-plated specimens held at 45 percent of load for 150 hours. A product that was never submitted cannot have passed it. You cannot tell the two approaches apart in a photograph. You can tell them apart in ten years, when one airframe still comes up and the other has areas that will not, and there is no repair for spent cladding except a strip and repaint nobody planned.
What changes the answer
Where the aircraft sleeps. Hangared in metro Atlanta is a different problem from sitting out near salt air, where repaint intervals shorten to about four years and polished surfaces go off faster still. Filiform corrosion under paint is inhibited by storage below 70 percent relative humidity, which in Georgia means a conditioned hangar rather than a shade port. How much cladding is left, which is an inspection rather than a guess: an airframe polished hard by three previous owners may not have the material for another decade. Whether there is a funded schedule or only an intention. And what the aircraft is for. An aircraft that is shown, chartered or photographed earns its polish back in a way a hard-working commuter does not.