I find the intuition extremely helpful - without the intuition, it's hard to build a gut feeling for the interrelation and relative importance of the bits in th

I find the intuition extremely helpful - without the intuition, it's hard to build a gut feeling for the interrelation and relative importance of the bits in the jargon soup for any given question - apijove vs ascending node, and so on. What works best is therefore a combination of the two: I have often found myself digging into the math when I want to get something /really working/ in KSP. You start the game by trying to keep the burning end pointing down (and eventually sideways), but the Rocket Equation forces us learn about Hohmann Transfers if we want to get anywhere interesting. (And maybe even get back again.) Notably, it's the /constraints/ that create the need to optimize, which push us from playing back to the math. The sibling commenter who doesn't like dealing with fuel misses the point: Caring about fuel pushes us to find the mathematical tools to solve our problems. Compare to Outer Wilds, which has a really fun physics simulation - you can whip around planets like a madman - but there's no real constraints on fuel, and the solar system is small enough that speed isn't really a problem, either. No constraints means no one ever has to figure out a Hohmann transfer.