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ProdigalPianist: I agree with everything you've said. Almost.

Notes and scribbles are far harder to replace than an expensive score - and often far more important!

Not too many of them, old bean, otherwise I wouldn't be re-engaged.

I am certain that even old wives can also improve their sight reading skills by properly practicing sight reading.

As for expecting nirvana from earthly pursuits, perhaps your key issue is a tendency towards wishful thinking and setting unrealistic expectations rather than just getting on with it?

Horses for courses. There is a time for sight reading (e.g. skimming potential literature options, working with ensembles, getting a helicopter view of new pieces, falling in for mundane gigs such as church accompanying, etc. etc.) and there is a time for careful measure by measure, hand by hand close study and memorization of music (learning pieces to be performed publically without a score, preparing for exams, etc.).

Once you are proficient at sight reading, there is no small amount of intense pleasure to be derived from sight reading classical pieces from the masters for one's own amusement and edification on a lazy Sunday morning. When reading and playing become one in the same way that reading a novel and imagining in the mind's eye its content become one.

Can everyone do it? No, but not everyone can read or read for pleasure either. It is a complex skill that must be learned and practiced.

I think what you need to do is maybe go over your existing pieces, decide on which ones are your favourites, and then set yourself practice days for each one, so maybe put a little plan together, and then try and source some new songs that are similiar to those ones if thats the style you enjoy playing!

You will soon have a nice little repertoire of favourite songs!

If you relearn the pieces which you no longer remember you will find that they stay in your memory better than pieces you have just learned. I needed to increase my repertoire ( mostly ragtime ) from about half an hour to over an hour this summer after volunteering to play at an engagement party.

It takes a lot of work to double the size of your repertoire because you need to devote some time to maintaining the pieces you know well while working on the not so strong ones. Having been through this exercise I could get that repertoire in shape pretty quickly if another circumstance arose where I needed to play for an hour.

Some people have suggested reading and that works well if you are a strong reader and are in a position to read. I rely on a combination of reading and memory, I play mostly from memory but I have the music in front of me as a reference in case I need it. Sometimes it's not practical to use sheet music, for example if you happen to be somewhere with a piano and you don't have any music with you, if the light is poor or if you are playing outdoors where the wind could blow the music around. For those reasons it's good to have at least a few pieces memorized.

I posted the following story some time ago but it seems appropriate to trot it out again as I think it is very relevant to this discussion.

An old gardener was asked how many coats of linseed oil should be applied to a fork handle?” He replied,

“Put on a coat of oil every hour for a day, then
put on a coat of oil every day for a week, then
put on a coat of oil every week for a month, then
put on a coat of oil every month for a year, then
put on a coat of oil every year for the rest of your life.”

Our memory works exactly like that. We need to refresh it frequently initially, but as the item we are trying to memorize becomes more secure we can retain it for increasingly longer periods.
It is the principle and not necessarily the same time intervals as in the story.

Students studying for anything do, or should, use this principle to organize and plan their study. They should have items in one compartment that they need to review or revise every day. Another compartment with things to check weekly and so on. Items can be moved to different compartments as required. Cards in a box with dividers could be used.

The same principle can be used to retain music in our memory.