It really sounds like you had a not-so-great teacher for your math courses at the university. What makes me think this way is I shared the exact same sentiment

It really sounds like you had a not-so-great teacher for your math courses at the university. What makes me think this way is I shared the exact same sentiment for math that you did in high school. I hated memorization and things took a turn for the better the moment that teachers stopped giving formulas already derived through calculus and started using calculus in front of me to get to the final usable form of the formula.