Ski length vs price

At this point I'm going to gracefully bow out and make my decision without causing anyone any undue concern!

Well that's no fun!
Don't worry mate, remember THE BEST SKIER IS THE ONE HAVING THE MOST FUN!
Enjoy your skis and the BC and I like your name.
My herofish is Moby Dick followed a close second by the original Great White Shark in Jaws.

Edit to add. Of course Moby dick was a whale so not a fish and I'm no marine biologist so maybe Silas was right.
See here.

*btw, I would take my 193 praxis over your 191 mantras every day 

Which Praxis ski you riding? What is your feel on that board?
There are so many skis in the market now, it is hard to get a handle on them all.
Which is good for us.

I have the Praxis Big Mountain 110's in 193cm I wrote a community ski review over on teletips if you want some details. I don't think praxis is making that ski anymore. It's a very slight rockered tip, 112mm underfoot, flip tail, big mountain ski without a lot of sidecut. They are fantastic porpoising down the fall line on a powder day. I bought them unmounted used from someone who ordered them and they were so much bigger than the rest of his skis, he decided to sell them before even giving them a single run. At 193, it took more than a few runs to realize they didn't tolerate any lack of commitment to the fall line.

Interesting opinions.  I can tell you after skiing hard for over 50 years, that the cost of skis means nothing re skiability, length has become an increasingly meaningless number, and  recommending skis is a damned hard job to do well.  The best we can do for others is to state our weight, years and expertise at skiing, and then share our specific experience with a specific model of skiis.  All else is white noise.  We all ski differently; we weight, unweight or steer our skis diffently; we angulate, edge, lean forward, sit back, etc, etc, etc differently.  So identical skis will ski differently for each of us.  And after laying out our hundreds of dollars on new boards, we will feel obligated to get our maximum value from  them, whatever they are.  And so,  we most often adapt and change our skiing style and methods to best suit our skis.  Or, if we have the money, quickly get rid of them and begin the search again.   I've found no substitute for on-snow demo'ing of skis, whether backcountry, sidecountry on in-bounds boards.  Most of us aren't that patient, and want to make the buy when so moved.   As far as Herofish is concerned, the Karhu is almost identical to the K2, despite the length difference; the flotation area is the same.  He'll have the same surface area in front of and behind his foot with either.  So in my opinion, flotation and fore aft stability will be almost identical.  However, the slightly longer Karhu might hold better on ice, being longer; but - the Karhu's are softer, so the stiffer K2's, though shorter, will probably hold just as well. 
I think the length issue is a) a carry-over from the old days, and b) the male thing about length having importance.  The Volkl mentioned at 177 still has 25% more surface area than a 205 cm length performance ski that a 6'4" skier might have skied in the '80's.  Short of finding people out there of the same height, weight and technique as ones self to query re. skis, I've found the consul of good ski shop sales folk, ie MMW,  to be generally quite good.  They see and hear back from a lot of skiers, have often demo'd those boards at previous clinics, and aren't recommending crap just to get rid of it - they'd obviously quickly lose trusting customers, and no business can afford that.  All of the above being said, I'd rate selecting skis to be third on the list anyway.  1st: bindings (Dynafits); 2nd: boots (fit, fit, fit, supportive, warm, binding compatible, tourability); and 3rd: skis.  As said previously, if we've skied long enough we've learned to adapt our ski technique to the ski - and if necessary we'll have a great time with a dog ski until we can afford to dump it and begin the search for the snowy grail once again!  And finally, we spend what, 80% of our time going up?  So the balance of 20% of the time, when we aren't putting our skins on, or off, or picking ourselves up and trying to get the damn pins centered to step back in the binding, well maybe we're actually skiing 5% of time.  With that little amount of time at stake, should we even pretend it matters what ski we're sking??

mmmmh. I don't think I agree with much of what you say but and you may be a bigger cynic than even me BUT I like your views and post. Made me think about my positions.

I guess my main disagreement is that the choice of ski doesn't matter. Thats's not been my experience. I'm not sure there's a hell of a lot of difference between a Rossi S7 and an Armada JJ apart from some very small differences that only experts can discern but there's an incredible amount of difference between a Rossi S7 ( rockered, superfat) and a Dynafit Mustah Ata ( skinny, no rocker) and the experience of skiing them downhill in deep PNW snow will prove that.

As to 95% of the time skiing up and transitions then only 5% downhill. I still put the emphasis on the downhill so will suffer heavier skis and boots for the uphill to maximize downhill performance while at the same time searching for lighter boots and gear that will reduce the uphill suffering.
My list would look different from yours.
1) skis- most important
2) boots- Need good fit but still 1) affects my skiing performance more
3) bindings- Meh.. they all work.. some better than others.

However, its good we are all different as it would be a boring place if we all thought the same.
Question for you.. after 50 years of skiing .... have you tried skiing in fat rockered skis?

However, its good we are all different as it would be a boring place if we all thought the same.
Question for you.. after 50 years of skiing .... have you tried skiing in fat rockered skis?

Gaawwdd....Still trying to pull more disciples into the fat rocker club?

I bought the Rossi Super7 last year and sold them about two weeks later.
The rocker made the skiing slower as I would try to get more speed and the gathering snow under the shovel would actually slow the ski down and it was hard to determine when the ski would be held up by the snow.
But it really noodled well through tight trees with a lot of cut up snow.
Overall not my cup of tea.