I am wondering what an armored vehicle in the field looks like underneath…I envision base layer factory paint all scratched up and gouged, streaks of rust and bare metal front to back. Then mud and various foliage. Was the escape hatch cleared every day? How much would the crew put up with before sending the FNG underneath to clear and scrub?
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A friend was a TC on an Abrams, and he told me that he once saw the underside of a tank after a “training mishap”. It was as you described - scratched and gouged to heck. Cleaning? I don’t think anybody actually crawls under tanks to clean them. They just drive them to the wash rack and blast away.
On a humorous side note, that same friend tended to not do any weathering to the undersides of his tank models, reasoning that no one picks up his models to look underneath.
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Yup,I throw a layer of the basecoat on and that’s it.I will weather the back side of the wheels that can be seen underneath though.
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The 113s and 901s that I was on had their bottoms scoured clean of paint. They were full of scrapes, scratches and dings, but the aluminum armor on them was pretty bare of all paint. At the end of every field problem all mud and dirt was blasted off the track with high pressure hoses. First at the wash rack and later in the motor pool at the “bird bath”. In the field whatever dirt and mud was on there was on there until ENDEX and the wash rack. Dirt and mud was not tolerated on the parking line in the motor pool. I can’t answer for tanks as I was not a tanker, just a grunt.
Knocking off the heavy mud before going in the wash rack
In the wash rack hosing the tracks off with the high pressure nozzles
That settles it then. Scratched and gouged to heck, followed by whatever the wash rack manages to blast off. 
For that matter, the same argument could probably be made for aircraft. Nobody is picking up one of my aircraft to inspect the underside either. I know some people display them over mirrors so you can see all that work underneath, but I don’t think I’ll ever be one of them.
I also have to admit your friend’s philosophy on weathering the underside makes a lot of sense. If somebody at a show picks up one of my models to see whether I weathered the bottom properly, we’re going to have an entirely different discussion.