Polishing to a shine

Do you ever get yourself in a knot with all the drafts of your wip? I do. Early on in this game, I used to get myself in a panic, thinking I'd deleted the wrong version, but never actually did that.
Now I take a more measured view.  Instead of spending time comparing one version with another, which I suspect is, 9 times out of 10, a waste of time, I look at the dates, check the word count and then force myself to delete the oldest, assuming that the newest draft is the best one. So far, I have not had cause to regret this.

My oldest version of Capture a Queen dates from September 2010, when it had the title Treason until someone pointed out what Matho was doing wasn't exactly treason. It was a complete version. I finished Treason and then went straight on to volume 2, completed it and started volume 3. Alas, I did not finish that volume. I hit a difficult plot spot and decided I'd take a break from volume 3 and go back to volume 1 and read it over again. That was March this year. Since then, I've been working on what at various points was Treason, then King's Business and finally Capture a Queen, and it is amazing the changes I've made.

I see now where my writing was not as graceful as it could have been. Two sentences, sometimes three, have been pared down to one and that one more graceful than the originals. I've removed the dreaded Superfluous Words and inserted better, more descriptive verbs. Some dodgy plot points have been smoothed or changed or even moved to a different part of the story.
I am calling this stage polishing, for that is what it feels like. Buffing the story to a real shine, ready to send out.