My guess would be that you'd moved to the white stone too early--where the bevel wasn't quite there yet and the fine stone polished away the aggressive, toothy feel that the brown had left on there. Lots of times knives "feel" sharp to the touch after a few swipes on a coarse sharpener but shining a light on the edge will show areas that are still blunt. You want to remove all of these with the coarse abrasive and get it capable of shaving (even if it pulls on the hairs a little bit) before moving to the fine.
The diamond showed faster results of course because it cuts faster. Nothing wrong with getting there with the diamond and then finishing off with the ceramic, or doing what you're doing now. I do prefer polished edges on anything that will be chopping as they bite better and last longer, but on a smaller knife I like a medium finish for much more aggressive slicing. On pure skinning knives, often I'll leave them coarse.
As to stropping, no 3V isn't by its nature any harder than any other steel---if it's at 59 HRC then it's just as hard as a 1095 blade at 59 HRC. It's more abrasion resistant, but we're not talking miles and miles of difference, especially in regards to polishing the edge with a dedicated abrasive that's designed to remove material instead of, say, comparisons on skinning feral hogs. Again, once the actual steel removal has been done with coarser grits, it'll polish up fairly easily with the finer stuff.
As a side note, I would recommend picking up some coarse diamond stones for your initial material removal. If not, then keep it touched up with that ceramic after every use and occasionally even when you haven't been using it just to maintain that keen-ness and not allow it to become genuinely dull.
