Advice on deck prepping before staining

Hello and thank you for the vast amount of information found on your website. I’m about to take on a staining project for a 8 year old deck that has been previously stained with Olympic semi-transparent (water-based acrylic oil hybrid) about 4 or 5 years ago with no real maintenance ever since. We want to completely remove the Olympic stain to apply a better stain. After gathering all the information found on your website I think we have our plan:

1) Strip the deck to help remove some of the previous stain
2) After drying for 48 hrs, sand the deck with 60-80 grit.
3) Wash the deck with deck cleaner
4) Brighten the deck with wood brightener
5) After drying for 48hrs, stain using TWP or Armstrong stain.

Can you confirm if these are all the steps required and in the right order to achieve optimal results? Are they all required in our case (eg: stripping AND sanding? or just 1 of the 2? )? We don't mind doing all the work, we're only looking to achieve best results as possible. I have added a picture to show the current state of the deck. Thanks in advance for the help.