I find that if I get lazy and don’t pull back my inside foot, I flirt with ending up with a huge amount of tip lead and become unable to engage the new inside edge when I turn. Then my old inside ski wants to keep going in the direction that it was going, my body thinks that it is trying to move down the hill, the leg that will become my new inside leg has no idea where to go, and well, it is not very pretty. If you guys can’t follow what I just described, then imagine how I feel.
Exactly. If you're lazy with the positioning of the "old" inside foot, when it becomes the new inside foot at the top of the turn, you won't be able to pressure it correctly if it's too far forward (CoM behind BoS as the PSIA-folks say it). Then the new inside ski will just run off to the side and not get edge engagement so that you have the ski working correctly in the high-C portion of the turn. If you don't have high-C engagement, you're not really working the skis until what should be the apex of the turn, and the result is usually a hard edge set at the bottom and what we call "grinding" the bottom of the turn. You end up grinding where you should already be "light"/releasing and working on the top of the new turn.
This all can stem from poor free foot management. Keeping that inside foot back is actually a fairly critical skill in high performance turns (at least if you want more than one in a row ).