It might be essential, but it's also overrated as a primary measure of mastery. The more difficult the subject matter, the less useful rote memorization is in t

It might be essential, but it's also overrated as a primary measure of mastery. The more difficult the subject matter, the less useful rote memorization is in the end; there were plenty of people with near-photographic memories that I saw failing upper level math courses at university. And I knew plenty of people that excelled at that level but had to look up specific formulas all the time (as best as I could figure, they tended to remember quite well what transformations the formulas allowed, just not the exact form that they allowed them in). That said, it's certainly not going to hurt anyone to increase their rote memorization abilities, in fact it's probably extremely useful in general, no matter what field you're in.