Being only 25 . . . for the 3rd time

, I KNOW what you mean as I too like to manually clean the neck and shoulder that way. One of the things that helped a lot is getting thin non-slip gloves as it makes it much easier to twist the cases and hold the steel wool. It really helped and was able to go much faster as I cleaned my brass after annealing.
A couple months ago, I decided to experiment with ways to do get the necks and shoulders clean without straining my fingers so much. I thought about the process of wet tumbling, which is not something I like to do . . . especially with steel pins. I put 100 of my freshly annealed brass into a small bucket that's filled with 1/2 gallon of hot water and tablespoon of Lemi Shine and soaked the brass for ~ 5-7 minutes and gave the brass some swirling agitation on and off. After pouring that water out, most of the powder residue was off. I put another 1/2 gallon of warm water and a small squirt of Dove dishwashing soap; swirled it for a minute or so and followed with a rinse. What was left on the neck had been softened and came off really easily with a single quick twists of a wash rag. Not only was the necks and shoulders really clean, but the brass was pretty shinny. Since they weren't tumbled in any way, there is on peening of the case mouths and the residual powder coating on the inside of the neck, which I like to preserve, remained. To clarify one thing, my brass is always ejected into my hand and never get into the dirt, so they're relatively clean to start with.
Since I anneal my brass after every firing, I wanted to see what happens if the do this same cleaning process before I anneal. The result was they came clean much easier than after being annealed. And annealing them afterwards dries the insides nicely. Here what they look like afterwards (note the powder residue still inside the necks):
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PS: That light burnishing ring below the shoulder is just what I get from my Trim-it II when I trim the cases.