@agreen, 17 days isn't a whole lot of skiing if you are at level 8. I feel your pain! I ski 60 days per year, and this last season it finally hit me that it wasn't enough time for me to improve at the rate I want to improve. Getting "better" just takes longer than I thought.
Some of that 60 days is spent teaching, but not all of it. When I'm not teaching, I'm deliberately working on building skills. I ski about 4 days per week, with some week-long trips scattered about. Two of those four days per week are free-skiing days, and the other two are teaching days. When teaching, I don't teach all day long. There's free-skiing time in between teaching sessions.
But I've decided that this 60-day schedule hasn't been giving me enough free-skiing time to increase my skills at a rate that I find satisfactory. At my level, whatever that is, I am finally aware that I need more concentrated time for "deliberate practice" than my usual schedule allows. It just takes longer to learn than I originally thought. So next season I've decided not to teach. I'll find out if 60-ish days of free-skiing nets more skill gain than in the past. I think it will. But it's not the sheer number of hours on snow that I hope will lead to personal improvement. It's other stuff.
Here are the factors that I have found impact
my speed of learning new stuff. I'm not sure if they apply to you, agreen, or to others, though.
--Age may play into how long it takes to embed a new movement pattern that replaces an old dysfunctional one (I'm 67). Young people seem to embed new movement patterns faster than old ones. Oh well.... that's one factor I can't change.
--Knowing what to work on is always an issue; not knowing or misunderstanding what to work on can slow one down or result in dead-end investigations. So there's that omnipresent issue of what constitutes better skiing. It's clear people don't agree.
--The presence or lack of informative and inspiring coaching clearly plays a role in figuring out what to work on. It also figures into knowing whether one is "getting it" or not. Personal feedback from a coach is critical.
--Personal willingness to experiment and do trail-and-error plays a role in discovering what movement patterns work better. One must be willing to humiliate oneself, fall, and be seen doing stupid-looking stuff out there in public on the snow, in order to discover what works, and what doesn't.
--Willingness to push oneself to the limits of capability and work at that edge of competence, then back off, is essential. So fear of bodily damage can slow one's progress down. Same for fear of public humiliation. But then public shaming can happen, as can broken limbs and detached ligaments. What's a skier to do?
--The proclivity to be experimental and analytical can speed up the process of discovery. These can enable one to efficiently engage in trail-and-error investigations. Not liking to "think" while skiing can inhibit learning, IMO. Informed choices of what to try helps speed progress.
There are those who believe otherwise. They are the ones who say "you're overthinking it.
--The more one knows about the factors that can be manipulated while doing the trial-and-error experimentation, the more efficient one can be in landing on something better. In other words, informed, flexible thinking helps.
--But I don't mean ... Oh look, squirrel!
--Long non-stop runs help. There's no substitute for having plenty of time to let the body adjust its balance while trying something new. It's awful to always be getting to the lift just as something begins to kick in.
With all this in mind, I don't think a season of 17 days of free-skiing would net much gain --
for me. YMMV.
