My (limited) experience with optometrists is that they're a total scam. Went to one, looked in the machine, paid a lot of money for glasses. The glasses immediately gave me headaches. Never wore them again and my eyesight is still 20/10 (somehow one eye is significantly better than the other, but apparently that's not uncommon).

Do you perceive your eyesight to be better?

I honestly think that your own experiments and experience are worth their weight in gold here. Keep on experimenting and don't listen to people reading from textbooks.