The question is whether this is a good model for an actual ski on ice. What you describe might be a good model for an absolutely perfect carve, but that basically never happens in reality. When it does, it’s on softer snow where the tuned corner of the edge is a negligible part of the overall interaction with the snow.

I agree with the quoted skier in the post, tuning skis doesn’t matter. I am someone who puts 400+ days on one pair of skis before replacing them, I ski pretty rough terrain and hit my share of rocks, I’ve gotten maybe 3 ski tuneups in my life, I couldn’t tell the difference after any of them. The only things I did to care for them was to store them dry and wax them once per season.

Other people are reporting that they can feel it with ice. Do you ski much on ice?

I’ve certainly skied ice and all kinds of crust.

In my experience true ice isn’t that bad in terms of grip, it’s rarely so smooth that edges can’t easily grip on surface imperfections. It’s not fun to ski because it’s very high impact.

I think what most people talk about as icy and slippery that seems to form on skied off groomers is actually some kind of crust that is hard to get edge hold in because the snow is somehow very firm but not well bonded to itself either, so what little edge penetration you get just scrapes off easily and doesn’t support the ski. When I try to picture what is going on in such snow, edge sharpness doesn’t matter, you might penetrate marginally deeper but that just means you’re scraping marginally more snow off.

Yeah the East Coast is often nothing but the base ice pack with some snow on top to make it more slippery.