We each have different ways of approaching this obviously - if I raced 4 times a week, I would have to give up my day job!! (May be given up for me soon, as there's no work currently, but that's an entirely different story
).
I wish I was 'naturally fast' and could get by with next to no practice, like you and a certain alien I believe. If I want a good result however, and I have enough of a competitive mindset to want that, then I need practice, and lots of it. If I work on setups, which is still very much a black art to me, I need a lot of laps to judge if the changes I made, made things better or worse, unless it has a very profound and immediate effect, and it seldom has. As I like to know what I'm up against, I often run full stints, or even full race distances in practice, to see how bad tyre wear gets, and perhaps work out a pit strategy, if one is needed.
Qualifying I usually do on a lighter fuel load, as I'm almost always faster in a lighter car. Fuel load is usually the only difference between race and qual setup though - I'm not advanced enough to change other things!
In addition, we've increasingly been moving towards multi-race, multi-car events, which requires even more preparation time. Now it's not unusual to have to prepare 2 or even 3 cars, and in the Australian series you can pick the 3 out of 5 each event - can you imagine how time consuming it is for someone with my approach ?
Today's series, with multi-class, multi-car options is almost just as bad, unless you just pick a random car/class and stick with it.
You guys often laud my consistency; well I guess anyone doing so many practice laps ought to be consistent..