This is actually not a bad way to go. Understanding which is then followed by rote memorization of basic identities and formulas frees up your brain to focus on higher level concepts. Like the tennis amateur who didn’t make pro because they never bothered to drill on the fundamentals, many people get bogged down in higher level math and physics courses because they’ve long lost or never developed a fluency with the basics needed to derive and understand the advanced concepts.
"It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle - they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments." - Alfred North Whitehead, "An Introduction to Mathematics", pp. 45–46
This is a good example of why upvotes and downvotes don't always work well when you have class imbalances (more young people than old people or vice versa). We upvote or downvote mostly based on intuition, but wisdom is not always intuitive--we don't always recognize it when we see it.
