Progress! I've actually managed to work on this for at least an hour, almost every night this week. I've spent a few hours at least, trying to remove all the horrendous punch marks on the insides of the body panels, that are all very painfully visible if not removed.
The punch marks on the rear most panel were deep enough that just sanding wouldn't work w/o leaving visible evidence of their removal. So I punched out some styrene disks w/ my punch, glued them in, and then sanded them flat. While gluing, I squeezed out liquified plastic out around the disks, so that when sanded, they wouldn't have any edge around them, and it appears to have worked pretty good. The rest of the punch marks were sanded down, they were either light enough or in areas where it wouldn't be noticed that they were sanded vs filled.
Once everything was sanded to my satisfaction, I assembled the body, and I think it looks pretty decent.
I'm really hoping to have all the assembly completed on this, this weekend and at least the first coat of paint down on it. Once I get to the paint stage, a lot of my models seem to grind to a halt so hopefully it doesnt happen w/ this one.