You definitely did alright with the Badger.
For thinning, lately I've been using ModelMaster airbrush thinner. I got a large bottle and was curious to see if it performed any better than the cheap miner spirits that I can buy at the local home center for about a fiftieth of the cost. Having used it for many airbrushing sessions, I find that it seems identical in paint performance to inexpensive stuff, and after my jar of ModelMaster thinner is used up, I'll go back the cheap stuff.
For cleaning, contrary Aztek mythology, you don't actually need to fully disassemble and breakdown the airbrush after each and every use.
When you're ready to clean, discard your left over thinned paint. (You can can store it for a few days, but for much longer than that it will spoil and become useless. Do not pour your thinned paint back into the jar of original paint because that will kill the entire jar of paint. You can search this forum and find several threads detailing the evils of storing thinned enamels.) I then use some thinner and an old paint brush to clean the bottle or color cup that I was painting from. I'll then use a plastic pipette (Testor's sells them in packages of three) to squirt some thinner into the the airbrush's paint chamber to clear out the bulk of the paint. I'll also use my cleaning paintbrush to brush inside as well.
At this point the easy thing to do is simply spray thinner though it as specified in the instructions. When I do this, I spray into my Testor's aribrush cleaning station. Basically this is a small jar with a filter pad. You spray the A/B into it and the thinner collects in the jar and the filter catches most of the fumes, thus not wasting a bunch of thinner. Lacking that, you can do almost as good by pointing the airbrush into a large jar and holding a paper towel over the opening.
About all this thinner that would seem to be wasted during cleaning, I recycle it. I have two large jars. Into one of the jars I pour all the dirty thinner and thinned paint that I discard. After several days, all the paint particles collect, forming a sediment on the bottom and leaving clear thinner above. I then CAREFULLY pour off the clear thinner into the second jar which becomes my source jar for cleaning thinner. Using that recycling process, a quart of cleaning thinner lasts for literally years. After a while, the thinner takes on a greenish hue, but it cleans just fine.