I've been reading about cleaning with Brasso, since I have a lot of it and can't find MAAS or Flitz. I keep reading about people having trouble getting it to do much work, and I'm wondering...
I use brasso all the time to clean a copper chain I made to hold my keys to my pants. I started off with the liquid version and it took forever to clean the stuff...I would put my chain in a cup with the stuff and have to shake for 5-10 minutes for the copper to be shiny again, and it took a similar amount of hand-polishing with a rag to restore luster to a brass letter-opener that belongs to my father. However, when I started buying the cream formula, it all went away...the chains were now cleaned in about 10 seconds, and the letter-opener needed only about 30 seconds of rubbing to get a mirror-finish.

I'm thinking, if the people on the forum are finding brasso time-consuming, if perhaps they are using the liquid formula. If this is the case, I'm sure the cream formula would probably polish and clean much faster.