Learning to recognize the characters is super important. It unlocks so many fun native resources to use as study material. Memorizing how to write characters is a waste for most learners who aren't really invested in it.
http://thepenngazette.com/characters-in-search-of-writers/
That aside, as it currently stands, yes, if someone were to learn Chinese/Japanese long term, yes, learning to recognize a few hundred characters helps in understanding a lot of native materials.
I'd say learning how to write those characters is mostly a waste for anyone other than historians, although kids are forced to learn it in school (I was one of them).
You are totally wrong here: this is a useful skill for anyone living there because, like it or not, this is how people are actually writing their languages. Also have a look at any scientific paper written in Korean and you will see how comical it is: every conceptual word is follow by its writing in Chinese characters in parenthesis because there is so many homophones for all the loan words coming from Chinese that using a phonemic script makes the text un-understandable.
(If you are a Japanese learner, learning kana wouldn't hurt, it takes a few weeks at most anyways vs years for kanji - and it's not like you "master" kanji after those years, as any native speaker would be able to demonstrate).
As gibolt said, it's much easier to just learn to recognize characters, without being able to write them by hand.
If you learn Japanese for, say, 2 years, even without consciously trying to learn the characters (e.g. by using rikai-chan/kun) when reading articles, you'll encounter the same words over and over so you'll be able to recognize them, even if you can't write them by hand. And that's good enough.
Most native Japanese speakers cannot write words like 咀嚼 or 憂鬱 by hand, but many more can pronounce them just fine.
That doesn't mean Chinese education is perfect right now, and I also think that traditional characters, while seeming more complex can be better for beginners as the system has a more regular internal consistency. And it's easier to learn simplified when knowing traditional than the reverse.
As a person who learned and teaches it, don't skip the characters.
They each have a specific order which makes the radicals and similarities and relationships between different characters clear.