Chess is touted as an ingenious game when it is little more than a brute-force search with simple prune and huge amounts of memorization.
I would argue that most GMs would easily play up to 200-300 elo points below their current level with little to no practice. But they spend decades of their lives memorizing and memorizing just to get the highest rating they can. And it is diminishing returns --- if you spent 1000 hours memorizing to get 100 points, the next 1000 hours will only get you 50 points. And when you reach your peak --- be prepared to keep memorizing forever just to stay there and inevitably drop when you reach a certain age.
What a waste of intelligence.
It is telling that nobody is pushing for chess960. This would greatly devalue memorization and make chess a brute-force-search-with-simple-prune game once again, as it was meant to be. But that's exactly the problem; if you are at the top after doing all this memorization you don't want to throw it away! In fact, your memorization might be better than your calculation in which case you will be surpassed by other players.