Armen,
I am happy with my tkat as well. I did the same cleaning with mine, but not quite as aggressive. My bike being black and silver, I wanted it to all look nice and shiny. I mainly used degreaser,a scrubby pad and some never-dull polish.
I also figured out a way to keep my fork protectors intact. explanation at the tail end of this post/thread:
http://suzukisavage.com/cgi-bin/YaBB.pl?num=1471017987 See pic. This is an older pic so it is not as nice and shiny as it originally was.