Just went through the same questions on what to do with my 350F covers... had them bead blasted, so was intending to polish... the blasting process revealed pitting and other flaws in the aluminum in the wrong places... on top and visible. I would say soda blasting would be safer, I had no such person around here.
Started sanding.... lotta work to get them down to polishing grit stage. Abandoned the idea since the flaws were too deep. So I bought Duplicolor Chrome paint, experimented then cleared. The Chrome paint seems very high in aluminum, doesn't dry true gloss... I cleared over it and it mellows it out. Looks nice and clean but doesn't look polished. When done is slightly different than Honda Cloud Silver, and I wasn't looking to match it to the engine (which I purposely did not clear). I did my forks with this, perfectly acceptable to me for my purposes. The paint solution is less maintenance. IF you look at the front caliper bracket, it is virtually the identical look, and it was cleared from the factory but I don't know how the aluminum was treated under... not polished for sure. That was my inspiration and the fork/brake parts are the same, painted those same time.
My next experiment would be..... soda blast, sand down to 1000-2000 grit, kinda polish with 0000 steel wool at least uniform all over. This may leave enough roughness for clearcoat to stick. I had polished a part earlier to like chrome..... clear will not stick well... if anything go 2K clear and it may harden on there but methinks better to have some roughness to stick to.
You just need to decide for yourself how you want it to look and experiment a bit on some metal coupons.
