Your setting in illustrator are similar to mine when I printed this:
Gradients had to overlap by quite a bit before you get any completely filled in dots and this print wasn't supposed to have a "solid" orange area, just a smooth transition.
When going between two non white colors I can see why playing with the sliders is good. But going from a color to white would seem easier/quicker to just put a solid white down and print red over it, I mean it's water-based so it won't have any different feel at the end of the day!
If you really have time to play with it, expose a couple screens with it BOTH ways and compare lol I'd be interested to see the difference!