Howdy
First off, yes you do over think things. Stop playing with that thing and take it out and shoot it.
When I buy a new gun, and I do mean new, I will often take it apart and do a little bit of work on it before I take it to the range the first time. But with all due respect, I have been at this a bit longer than you and I usually........how shall I say this tactfully.........I usually know what I am doing. Usually. I have been known to make some mistakes.
But when I was in your shoes, and I am making a big assumption here, I was 18 years old and my first Cap & Ball revolver was a brass framed 44 caliber Uberti 'Navy'. I didn't start messing around with it, yes I played with it a bit, but mostly I just took it out and shot it. I figured out how to take it apart to clean it, but I did not mess with anything. I just shot it and took it apart to clean it. I did not take any files to it, I did not try to 'fix' anything, I simply shot it, then took it apart to clean it, then put it back together again. A little while later I tried 'improving' my Dad's old Winchester Model '06, doing a little bit of filing here and filing there in an effort to make it better. I did not improve it, as a matter of fact I made things worse.
My point is, by playing with the gun you are accelerating the wear on it. As I have told you before, the parts in those guns are not very hard. They will wear sooner than parts in a more expensive gun. And I don't mean an Uberti, I mean a quality Smith and Wesson from the 1950s. A gun that has been properly soft fitted by an experienced assembly technician and then disassembled and had its parts hardened and blued, and then been reassembled and a final bit of fitting done before the gun was inspected, packed, and shipped. Nobody is doing all that anymore, not Pietta, not Uberti, not even S&W.
The 'scratches' you are seeing on the cylinder are a result of lowering the hammer from half cock and rotating the cylinder while the bolt was bearing against the cylinder. You probably did not really scratch the metal, you probably only wore the blue off. The 'scratches' on the ratchet teeth are probably the result of a burr on the hand. If Pietta used a bit more care in building their guns, that burr would not be there. But you could not buy the gun so cheap if they put that kind of care into assembly. Even without a burr on the hand, you are still rubbing metal against metal and something has to give. The blue will wear. Stop over thinking it and just take the thing out and shoot it.
As far as Pietta quality vs Uberti quality with C&B revolvers is concerned, personally I think Uberti quality is a bit better. Not a huge amount, just a bit. A few years ago I bought a pair of Pietta 1860 Armies. They were on sale at Cabellas and I ran up and bought a pair. I was not terrifically impressed with the finish of the frames. Specifically, there were small burrs on the surface of the frames that should have been removed before the frames were case hardened. I could remove the burrs myself, but then it would stick out like a sore thumb. Burrs should be removed before blue or case hardening is done, but that probably takes a few more minutes per gun and time is money, always has been. Yes, it is a fine point about the small burrs on the frame, but there you have it. Just for the heck of it I just took out the pair of 1860s and took a close look at the cylinders. Yes, there is a tiny amount of peening at the cylinder locking slots. That is completely normal, it happens with use.
I have not bought any Pietta guns since then, but friends in the CAS community report that Pietta quality has come up quite a bit in the last few years with cartridge guns. They definitely used to come in second to Uberti. I do not know if their C&B guns have improved in quality or not, my 1860s do not show it.
