I'm going to take a stab at this by way of analogy:
For the last ten years, my day job has been as a trial attorney. It's a real sink or swim world where nobody has any incentive to teach you anything, and you end up with a lot of mid-career trial attorneys who have gotten good at some things, stayed bad at other things, and basically don't have any resources to find any specific methods to improve what they do in court.
Then I got my employer to send me to a week-long workshop that was basically geared toward addressing this exact problem. There was a book that broke down a specific philosophy and method to trial practice. Judges and super-high-end trial attorneys teaching practical classes, and we prepared mock cases for trial in front of a jury, and then got to see the jury deliberations and ask the jurors questions afterward.
It was very beneficial formal educational experience because they broke down a series of complex skills, with a method to improve on a granular level each of those skills, coupled with some overarching philosophies, and then made you do all this stuff in front of real judges, super-lawyers, and lay-people - and then get all the real-world feedback. That was all stuff you would never be able to learn just by doing it, even though it is expected that everyone just learns by doing in that profession generally.
So, I think it is the same with music, you can get better by doing it, but you may get to a level where you are really good at what you are good at, and have plateaued at everything else, including some basic skills that are preventing you from expanding into other areas. Some good, relevant, focused instruction can help give you some skills and some methods to apply in order to get you out of rut, or help you make a quantum leap forward in your skills.
For the last ten years, my day job has been as a trial attorney. It's a real sink or swim world where nobody has any incentive to teach you anything, and you end up with a lot of mid-career trial attorneys who have gotten good at some things, stayed bad at other things, and basically don't have any resources to find any specific methods to improve what they do in court.
Then I got my employer to send me to a week-long workshop that was basically geared toward addressing this exact problem. There was a book that broke down a specific philosophy and method to trial practice. Judges and super-high-end trial attorneys teaching practical classes, and we prepared mock cases for trial in front of a jury, and then got to see the jury deliberations and ask the jurors questions afterward.
It was very beneficial formal educational experience because they broke down a series of complex skills, with a method to improve on a granular level each of those skills, coupled with some overarching philosophies, and then made you do all this stuff in front of real judges, super-lawyers, and lay-people - and then get all the real-world feedback. That was all stuff you would never be able to learn just by doing it, even though it is expected that everyone just learns by doing in that profession generally.
So, I think it is the same with music, you can get better by doing it, but you may get to a level where you are really good at what you are good at, and have plateaued at everything else, including some basic skills that are preventing you from expanding into other areas. Some good, relevant, focused instruction can help give you some skills and some methods to apply in order to get you out of rut, or help you make a quantum leap forward in your skills.
