If you can get the effect that you are looking for on occasion, I would say that it rules out your equipment & I don't think it's likely that your compressor is the cause. It would also suggest again that either thinning or the temperature & humidity of where you are working may have an impact on your results.
Adequate thinning is one thing, but for the type of job you are doing, even small differences in ratio can produce differing results. The addition of flow aid to your mix, like Liquitex Flow-Aid may help. A bit of messing around on some scrap plastic while adjusting the variables will likely let you figure out exactly what is giving you the variations in finish.
The general consensus on the type of painting you describe is to use as low an air pressure as your brush & paint combination will allow, but after recently doing a bit of playing around trying to get ultra fine, clean lines from my airbrush, I'm now confused;
Trying to get the thinnest line possible with Tamiya acrylics, using well thinned paint, very close to the subject with a fine needle, it all went reasonably well, I could get the fine line I wanted but there was noticeable overspray at the edges. To reduce the overspray I tried adjusting the thinning ratio, but this as expected gave poorer results either way & the only thing left to tweak was the air pressure.
I reduced the pressure as low as my airbrush would atomize the Tamiya acrylic at (8>10PSI) & tried again with little change in results, so I slowly increased the pressure to see if there was a pressure "sweet spot" which would give the least overspray. Up to about 25>30 psi, there wasn't really that much difference, but after 30psi the overspray started to reduce considerably.
The long & short is that I could get far less overspray working at maximum pressure (60psi) than I could at low pressure, this goes against what I understood about fine work, overspray & pressure. I'm figuring that either the paint around the edge of the airbrushes spray pattern was so dry that it simply didn't adhere, or that the increased pressure can hold the atomized paint within the airflow more efficiently for longer?