peaks are important in my book. But it is as much the recovery / burnout prevention aspect of it as it trying to peak for a specific race. Although I am trying to learn how my body responds to limited time off and shorter duration intervals to time those peaks. I, like nearly all cyclists, have many peaks and valleys to my season and have plenty of life to get in the way of my riding so I tend not to plan time off the bike ... it will happen regardless. And if not life, then weather, sickness, or eventually burnout. I get in my base miles with lower intensity, then starting adding intensity, then tend to find a spot where I just don't mentally have it anymore and take a break, if something hasn't taken me off the bike anyways. I often find that after my break my peak power for various durations is better, but my recovery and threshold are worse. I have to build into recovery and threshold again, but as I do that I start to lose a touch off my top end.
My goal this year has been trying to time all three items (peak power/recovery/threshold) to merge into a single peak at the same time ... I am 4 weeks away from my hopeful peak, will have to wait to see how I did.
So I am not sure where I fit into the peak/maintenance mode of training styles, but for most of my time cycling it has just been ride as much as possible and maintain. Recently I have been trying hard to organize and plan my schedule along with taking better notes so that I can figure out what works for me. The biggest issue I have so far is that nothing is the same from year to year and my body seems to respond differently to the same stimulus depending on things that I can't figure out.