I've always played by ear ever since I can remember. I've been a two-handed player from the start. My parents couldn't afford to send me for music lessons and, much later, when I was in my mid-thirties, I did start going to a music teacher but I gave it up because I too was mimicking rather than than 'reading the dots'.
There's not to much I can't handle in pop and rock music, but I sometimes wish I had been taught the proper way as, due to my self-learned, improper fingering technique, there are some limitations in my playing. For instance, I don't have the fluidity in jazz and blues licks going up the keuboard as I do in playing down the keyboard. For some peculiar reason, I don't use the third finger of my right hand very much and there are some key signatures I wouldn't touch with a 10' barge pole, i.e., C sharp, E flat, F sharp, A flat or even B (thank goodness we can dodge around that one with the transpose button these days).
I'm a decent enough singer and can read chord symbols easily enough, so with that and a fast ear, I find that the 'skills' that I do have are quite adequate enough. But that old 'what if' does haunt me from time to time.