Paul, what you write in your last paragraph holds a lot of meaning for me. Not in terms of listening, but something similar. I had a lifetime without lessons but had played any instrument I could get my hands on. Had a piano for a while as a teen and when it went, transferred the music onto guitar. Then went 3 decades without a piano. At close to 50 I had my first ever lessons on violin as a new instrument. I progressed very fast, did well, and then everything crashed after a year. A poor instrument causing injury was only one factor. I started to look for answers and interacting with teachers/musicians. One told me that I had a bad combination - instant grasp of music things plus no training - very hard to teach. Two others said similar. The solution for me goes to your "beancounting". That is, I needed to slow down, and learn very basic rudimentary things even if I seemed to be past that.
I did not listen to music in order to play it. I heard things from the notation, and I anticipated what the composer would be doing. It was instinct, things absorbed passively over the years, a broad "whole". We didn't know that I wasn't reading music but tracing broad patterns, hearing a line of notes as a scale, and predicting call-answer patterns etc. Near the end of lessons I realized that the answer lay in basic things. The simple act of seeing A and associating that as a place on the keyboard or string, which everyone does, was huge.
I didn't get "listen more" but was urged to play with feeling. When I got the piano I ran across a teacher here and there on-line who stressed spontaneity, since they get the mechanical playing. I was being deliberately mechanical, feeling this was the part I was missing. I feared I would get a teacher who would say "but you have it already" if I sought basics, and I'd be on the same merry-go-round. I know that the mechanical and feeling inter-relate and are woven into each other. Someone who is too mechanical may want to draw on feeling, and feeling will propel the body so to say. It's all about balance. However, if you sense a lot of things in the music and you feel them all, and want to express that without having the knowledge of how to, it can turn into a jumble of impulses: you go into knots, or it becomes something crude.
I got a piano again, and have been working with a teacher who is on top of it (to my immense relief). Very often I have to work on the simplest thing, like how to move effectively to play a note or a chord, which is also the usual matter of undoing self-teaching. Like, what I need is also good for everyone. Our approach to music essentially is to start in a bean counting manner, turn it into music via the beans, and then remove the scaffolding. Again the principle is probably for everyone because music is also crafted, put together. What the listener hears as a cohesive impression is created in various ways through knowledge of how the instrument and sound work. It takes away some of the magic, but it's magical in its own right.