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Pardon me if what I'm about to say is stating the obvious, but I just want to present my thoughts on using Munsell, or any color system for that matter. His is a system based on representing color in a three dimensional tree, not just two as is shown in color wheels. It's possible to create a wheel from his system, but it would be a disection of a 3-D sphere of aligned hues. Most other systems don't acknowledge value (darker and lighter ranges)at all in their structure.
His system centers around the afterimage affect of light perception (stare at a red dot and you'll see a blue-green afterimage,) and his arrangement of five principal colors reflects this affect in terms of a linear balance of opposites.
Balance is a key word to understanding his sytem in that it shows linear gradations for each of the color properties along an axis, the center being a neutral gray. As such, he was able to construct an accurate notation system on a grid to catalog each color chip so it could be easily recreated.
All of the color systems have certain limits. If they're based on light, painters don't use light, but rather pigments which don't mix in the same way. Mixing red and green light makes yellow. Also any system based on colored light that represents itself using printed pigments, is working with a limited construct. Conversely, if the system is based on pigments, which pigments and in what mixture? New pigments are constantly being developed and introduced, and paint companys make their products differently without any standarization. It's like, we have a system, but now how do we use it?
The challenge for painters is to learn how their pigments mix together. Even Munsell doesn't tell you how certain pigments behave. That's up to you to learn how to handle, and to deal with their limitations, not to mention how to modulate the color optically on the canvas with underpainted colors, how neighboring colors affect it, etc.
There's a good book I would recommend by Edith Feisner called "Color Studies" that presents an overview of various systems and basic colro principles rather clearly in an applied manner.
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