Memorization is not skill.
The trouble with this statement is that Memorisation *is*, by itself, a skill that some people have and some people don't, whilst at the same time just because I know how every spellcard in Imperishable Night extra (for example) works, that doesn't necessarily mean I'll be able to dodge everything perfectly and clear the stage no bombs no deaths.
Let's take Ex-Keine's first and third cards as an example. The first card requires you to work out a way of getting through the blue bullets whilst allowing yourself room to stream the red ones afterwards, whilst the third one requires you to basically stream everything. Once you know what you're doing, both of these attacks should logically be irrelevant and require no brainpower; despite this, I still fail both of them on occasion because I tap slightly too hard, or I mess up my route, or an aimed bullet is a little faster than I gave it credit for.
Using an Ex card as an example is probably bad because Ex-Stages are more geared towards memorisation, so let's take a different example: Orin's Ghost Wheels. Reading this forum, the wiki, any guide, video or replay shows you how Ghost Wheels works, so there's no way you can randomly just get trapped by it. But the Hard / Lunatic versions are still formidible, requiring you to make pixel-precise dodges whilst keeping track of the wheels and whilst trying to get damage through: multi-task or die.
The reason Touhou is so appealing to me as a challenge is because you can work out how an attack works, but you still need to have actual skill to dodge the bullets.
