"Stopped being about results"? I think you're referring to the building-up of the vocabulary required to attain results. As an analogy, you learnt to count (1,2

"Stopped being about results"? I think you're referring to the building-up of the vocabulary required to attain results. As an analogy, you learnt to count (1,2,3,4,…), but then when addition and multiplication were introduced, it "stopped being about numbers, and more about abstract and complicated operations on numbers". Yes, fine, but addition and multiplication open the gateway to the study of the primes, from which most of the results of number theory follow.