These things always fall into that catagory of "it depends" as far as I'm concerned. If you were talking about a complete high-end bike with all original components that YOU were going to ride I might be inclinded to say preserve it as is...but I take it you're building a nice vintage step-through frame city bike and your wife would like for it to look nice. So...paint it and if you like, reproduce the uneven green "flames". I would generally say that when having a bike repainted I would try to reproduce the best of what could have been on a good day at the factory. In other words, I wouldn't try to reproduce the specific imperfections of this particular bike but neither would I want to over restore the paint job to the point that it could never have come out of the factory that way. Pretty vague I know. And even that isn't for always the way I would go. If the bike in question were special in some way - like a bike that I had owned since it was new or one with special provenance - then I might reproduce the imperfections. So who knows? In this case just make it look nice. I know if I tried to explain all of the reasons discussed here as to why I was reproducing defects in the paint job my wife would just roll her eyes and shake her head.