Hi Donald,
Good questions. If my life was as unmanageable today as it was when I first got into the program, I have serious doubts about the effectiveness of the program. Same for the actual drinking part of the powerlessness over alcohol. In one sense, I am as powerless over alcohol as I was seven years ago but I have remained sober for seven years and I lost the obsession to drink sometime during my first year working the steps.
The book says both "precisely how we have recovered" and "what we really have is a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition." For me this means that something really does change as a result of working the steps but this change is not irreversible. If I stop doing what it takes for me to maintain my spiritual condition, I won't magically stay recovered. If I decide I no longer need to rely on my higher power, I am going find out why I do need to rely on my higher power all over again.
I can't pick out one or even two of the twelve steps which produced the change. The spiritual awakening is the ongoing result of working all the steps. I'd say steps ten and eleven are very important in helping me to separate the things I can change from the things I cannot change on daily basis, but without the nine steps which came before, I wouldn't see the need to change or the need to ask for help. It was those nine steps which made crystal clear that the program I worked for 25 year did not work and would never work.