I wonder if coffee-guy is still around? If so:
Some of your situation sounds similar to things that I came in with in my first lessons as an adult. You already had a smattering of skills from playing other instruments. And maybe you were also self-taught in those other instruments? This was my situation. What I knew was all over the place, and I seemed to know some things when I didn't actually have the underpinnings, but that wasn't always apparent. The new instrument I took up was violin, where you don't have a keyboard's pile of notes. Example: I would take home the sheet music and come back playing it, so nobody knew that I didn't really know notes. Or I would put expression into my playing since as an amateur I have always done that with music, but it was however I could - I had no idea about technique. All the things that people who have had lessons with decent teachers know, I had never experienced: learning note names, how to approach pieces in practicing, that technique is a particular focus and gets developed gradually. At the same time, I seemed to have these things in some measure, because I was coming back playing new music I'd been assigned expressively. Once I hit the intermediate level it bit me in the rear, because I didn't have the skills to support me. That is, I am musically enough that I wanted to do something with these pieces, and I couldn't. My lessons started flopping around at that stage - a similar feeling of trying to find direction - like what you are describing. The solution was to finally talk it out with my teacher and set totally different goals. It's possible that there may be some answers for you in all this.
My conclusion for me is that what my lessons have to be about is not getting pieces to sound nice, but getting underlying skills and knowledge going from the bottom up. There can be pieces, of course. In fact, how do we do music without pieces? But underneath it all, there should be an underlying order, where I will be learning skill 1, skill 2, skill 3 (not rigidly). When I practice at home, that is what I focus on. When I go to a lesson, that is part of what my teacher listens for. Additionally, I need to know how to get this skill, and how to put it into my pieces. How do I practice it? How do I organize it over the day, and over the week? What am I aiming for? The reason I say "from the bottom up" is because it is too hard to figure out what I do and don't know, so the safest thing is to just get at each thing from scratch. Even if I do have it, it may not be the best way to go about things.
An important thing here is that the goals are actually out in the open. You cannot just come to lessons and hope that your teacher will aim for such things. He won't know what your goals are - it might be that you just want to mostly work on pieces for the sake of pieces, because many older students want that. The things that you can do might hide what you cannot do, or maybe whatever way you have developed in winging it seems good enough. If it's not defined, then things just won't happen. Like, in your posts, you write about learning to sight read. Is this an actual goal that has been set up with your teacher? And if there are other things that support sight reading like maybe theory or whatever, is that set up? Strategies for getting there?
It's after that, that you can start talking about good teachers, because if the teacher cannot help you with those goals, then this would not be a good teacher for you. Supposing that he only knows how to say "This piece sounds ok.", "The middle part is sloppy (but I can't tell you how to fix it.)" or "Remember that it's F# in measure 7." - I mean, only gives that kind of feedback on pieces, and can't do more - that's not enough. But you can't tell about a teacher if the goals aren't out in the open first.
Topic: What are the signs of a really good teacher?