....If the buckles are all tight there is too much pressure on my foot. If I loosen the buckles, my feet move around in the boot. I know the sole length is right. But I am wondering if this is a volume issue? Not the right boot for me?....Skiing in resort, I haven't been able to find a good buckle setting where my feet feel grounded in the boot and connected to my skis.....
The bolded above indicates your boot shells are too big for your feet.
Boot fit involves at a minimum three dimensions, length (which you may have right), width, and volume (ceiling height over your forefoot and around your ankle area). Width is complicated because it involves ball-of-foot as well as heel. Some boots are wide at the ball-of-foot area while being narrow at the heel, and some are the opposite. The boot that fits matches your foot's anatomy width-wise.
Volume is complicated because it involves air space above and around the heel as well as in front of the lower leg as it exits upward from the foot. There are high volume, medium volume, and low volume boots out there. Some shops stock all these options, others carry limited stock. Some boots are labelled LV, meaning low volume. Others are low volume without saying so on the box. Bootfitters should know their stock relative to volume. You may need a LV boot.
It sounds to me like your volume and width are both off. I speak from experience as a skier with quite low volume and extremely narrow feet. Your description indicates there's too much air in there. You buckle down tight to fill the space, but that deforms the boot, pressing its middle downward onto sensitive nerves running along the top of your foot. Nerves don't like that. But buckling tight won't narrow the bottom of the boot to make it snug against the forefoot; some parts of the shell may even bulge outward when you tighten the buckles. Look closely to see if this bulging is happening.
Your forefoot may be sliding left-right inside the boot. If you side-slip down something steepish, this ball-of-foot width issue can be quite evident. Check it out.
I've bought too-wide, too-high-volume boots because bootfitters didn't tell me about the existence of these factors and didn't check that my foot was snug enough volume- and width-wise in the shell. They were only interested in making a sale, and I was innocent as to what a good fit involved since I was a relatively new skier. They figured it wouldn't matter for me. I think this situation is all too common. Boots are expensive; this shouldn't happen but it does.
If the shell size is wrong for your feet, your bootfitter is at fault. But you won't know whether a refund or a replacement new boot is an option unless you ask. I suspect the bootfitter will want to avoid this option since the toe box has already been punched out.
An aftermarket liner, Intuition or Zipfit, may help, but both of those are expensive. And they don't address ball-of-foot width problems. The won't fill this area. Before you buy an aftermarket liner, be sure you know what dimensions you are trying to fill and whether the liner fills it. A properly fit shell would be better.
Glued-on shims that the bootfitter can attach (for free) to the outside of your liner are an option and probably what your bootfitter will want to offer, but they won't work very well if the issue is as intense as your description makes it sound (feet not feeling connected to the skis). And it's such a shame to go that option when the boot is new and should have been sized properly in the first place by the bootfitter.
It may be time to go back to the shop, with boots in hand, talk to the manager, and insist on satisfaction. Where did you buy the boots?
