Despite varying opinions on the article, most seem to be agreeing here that one thing that is making chess more boring is the memorization of moves and tricks.

Despite varying opinions on the article, most seem to be agreeing here that one thing that is making chess more boring is the memorization of moves and tricks. I'd like to offer a counter-point. This doesn't seem to take into account that many people enjoy learning and memorizing sequences and tricks. It's actually fun to learn patterns and sequences that have clever underpinnings and lead to surprising results. As another commenter said, there exist many variants exactly for the purpose of getting back to pure logic-level reasoning about positions. If that's what you want, go for it. Chess 960 for example is explicitly designed for that. But despite the existence of all these variants and other games, people still predominantly continue to play 'Chess', with its classic starting position and rules, and I would suggest that one of the things that keeps drawing people back is that there is sufficient "space" in the game for life-long learning, while providing a common and stable "interface" that allows everyone to exchange knowledge and build up a shared experience of learning and mastery. That on top of this there still most definitely exists a layer of strategy and "principles", not just memorization, is another aspect that will always draw people back to the game. A lot of these principles that have been developed and taught for hundreds of years go out the window with variants -- which is fine, it's fun to discover new games too, but sometimes you want to benefit from the knowledge and wisdom of experts, and the only way to do that is to play the same game as them.