You're doing to ecology exactly what the author complains teachers are doing to molecular biology.
Learning about molecular biology often begins with memorising what the cell is made of. I understand that many students find this dry and tedious. But it is in a way necessary, because only once you have this foundational knowledge can you go on to begin to understand the amazing complexity of how it all actually works.
Ecology is similar. Yes, taxonomy can be a drag (certainly in high school, or even early college). But you need to learn something about what's out there before you can start to think about, and wonder at, how it works. Ecology is an amazing subject, as complex and intricate as anything in molecular biology. (In a way, it's even more cryptic than the latter, because most of the experiments can't be done in a lab.) The problem is that most people have no clue what's out there, and so they never see the beauty that surrounds them, or realise the wonderful web of life playing out all around them.
Come for a walk with me through the woods, and let me tell you something about how ants grow their own food, or go to war with a neighbouring tribe, or treat their wounded with antibiotics. Or let's take a look at a dead tree, and see how the fungus has softened the wood, how beetles have burrowed through it, how they in turn attract woodpeckers, whose holes are then re-used by owls.
Due respect to Feynman as a physicist, but he had no clue about ecology. We are not collecting stamps, we are collecting the stories they tell - stories you'll never hear if you don't look at a few stamps first...