rwilsonblue,
You are talking about two different things, and they might need to be addressed separately:
A device will make it into the user table only if it has an ip address (even a .169 address). Devices that do not connect successfully, but still attempt, make it into the station table, but not the user table; that should be the discrepancy between the station table and the user table. That is a general statement and user table timers could affect how big this descrepancy is.
With regards to airwave, if you are using AMON to send traffic from the controller to Airwave, try turning off the "Prefer AMON" setting to see if there is a difference.