> In a modern environment, memorizing the minutia of an API should be as relevant as memorizing times tables.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that some things should in fact be rote memorized when learning something new. For example, I do think that the multiplication table should be memorized, at least up until ten. I've counted floor tiles and made rectangles out of them with my growing children, but I made sure that certain very small, common multiplication products were repeated often enough to be memorized. Likewise, I do bother to memorize e.g. the intricacies of %f float representation with printf(). Memorizing does not preclude understanding root concepts.