Three cheers for Surface_Line. I agree completely.
In serious scale modeling it's certainly useful and desireable to know the actual colors that were applied to the full-size object (be it ship, airplane, locomotive, or whatever). And I certainly respect the people who spend so much time figuring out what those colors were. But all sorts of factors affect the "accuracy" of color on a model.
To begin with, paints change color over time and due to weather conditions. Drive up and down a row of warships tied up to piers at a naval base and you'll see numerous shades of grey - despite the fact that all those ships were allegedly painted the same color originally. Then there's the question of whether the paint in the can actually matched - precisely - the government's specifications in the first place. (Nowadays I suspect the matches are extremely close. I'm not convinced that was always the case.)
Equally important is the often-discussed "scale effect," which various people have tried (unsuccessfully, to my notion) to quantify. They've offered lots of theories about why it happens (the effect of the intervening atmosphere on color perception, for instance), but the bottom line is that we simply do not look at 1/350-scale models with 1/350-scale eyeballs.
Yet another consideration (which I haven't seen discussed often): the effect of light. Anybody who's messed around with photography knows that light has a tremendous impact on how the human eye perceives color. The effect is especially pronounced in the grey range.
I used to work at a maritime museum, and sometimes had the job of restoring old ship models. I particularly remember a beautiful, large-scale (1/48, I think) four-stack destroyer. The paint on its hull had gotten beat up in a few places, and I was assigned the job of touching it up. I used Poly-S acrylics (reversible, therefore OK for conservation work like this), and spent a great deal of time matching the original shade of grey. Several other staff members, with fresh eyes, were unable to tell where the original paint stopped and my touchups started. I was quite happy with the result - until we rolled the model out of the workshop and put it back in its exhibit case in the gallery. Disaster. I'd neglected to consider the fact that the workshop was lit with flourescent lights, and the gallery had incandescent bulbs. My carefully-matched touchup spots now stuck out like sore thumbs; the fresh paint looked several shades darker than the original.
Most modelers, I imagine, display their models under either incandescent, flourescent, or halogen light. (Most museum curators will tell you that incandescent looks best, and flourescent worst.) I don't think you'll ever see a full-size aircraft carrier in any light other than sunlight (which is the worst possible light source to aim at a ship model). Remove a grey-painted piece of the real ship and take it indoors, under incandescent light. Your eye may or may not notice, but the truth is that the color will look different.
Start taking pictures of the real ship and the model, and you introduce another batch of problems. We've all seen comparison shots that demonstrate how much lighting, different kinds of film (in the Olde Dayes), different settings on a digital camera, and post-processing can affect colors (especially greys) in photographs. Even adjustments to your monitor can make a shade of grey look quite a bit different. Modern digital cameras, with their adjustable white balance settings, can reduce the problem considerably. But it's still unusual to find two color photographs of a warship in which the shades of grey look identical. Give me five minutes with Photoshop Elements and I'll make that aircraft carrier look bright red or bright blue - your choice. Give a real Photoshop expert (which I'm not) a photo of the real ship and a photo of your model, and he/she can make prints in which the greys match perfectly - regardless of how they look to the eye in real life.
Finally (believe me, this post will come to an end eventually) there's the matter of personal interpretation. There's room for argument, I guess about whether scale modeling is a science or an art. I firmly believe it's the latter, and I firmly believe that, even within the constraints of scale fidelity and realism, there's plenty of room for individual taste and opinion. I don't suggest that a model of an aircraft carrier whose flight deck was green with pink polkadots would be a scale model (though I don't happen to think the person who built such a thing would deserve to be arrested, either). I do, however, suggest that two individual modelers have every right in the world to their own opinions about just how that grey paint ought to look.
A person can quickly get a headache trying to resolve all these problems logically. Just what are we trying to do? Mix a shade of grey that looks the same under incandescent light as the full-size paint looks in sunlight? Paint the model in such a way that if we take it on board the real ship the greys will seem to match perfectly - when the ship is brand new? Or when she's been at sea for six months? Recreate the overall impression that the great ship herself made on us the first time we saw her? I don't know.
In my personal opinion, Surface_Line has the right idea. Find out, as best you can, what the real object looks like. If possible, get a firm idea in your head of what you want your model to look like. Then buy a few jars of paint, do some test shots, and see what happens. Don't hesitate to mix in a little blue, white, black, brown, or whatever if you think it will help. Then, having established how you think the model ought to look, do your best to make it look that way. And if somebody else doesn't think it ought to look like that, tell him/her to ![Censored [censored]](/emoticons/icon_smile_censored.gif)
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I've been messing around with this hobby for over fifty years; my memories go back to the days when everybody painted models with Testor's glossy paints (which cost ten cents per bottle). I've watched the development of the hobby - and specifically the development of the hobby paint industry - with somewhat mixed emotions. On the one hand, the sources of information in print and on the web today have put the hobby into a different, fascinating world than the one it occupied when we had nothing to go by but the instruction sheet. ("Hull - grey. Deck - tan. Bottom - red. All gun barrels - silver.") The paints we have at our disposal are infinitely better (and safer) products than those of The Bad Olde Dayes, and the vast range of available colors unquestionably is a boon to the hobby. On the other hand, if we ever reach the point where the gurus, magazines, and contest judges "order" us to use paints with particular FS numbers, and a modeler who uses something else feels like either a failure or an anarchist, I'll take up knitting instead.
Sorry to get up on ye olde soapbox for so long. But this seems to be a topic that gets a lot of attention these days, and I'm genuinely concerned that so many people feel like their models are no good if they don't follow the "rules." The truth of the matter, as far as I'm concerned, is that there aren't any rules - and I, for one, hope there never will be.