For me it’s time signatures in music. I grew up playing instruments, played in several orchestras, etc. But no matter how many times someone tries to explain time signatures to me, it makes no sense. I don’t understand why people place such importance on it. To me, notes have a pitch and a duration, maybe some dynamics. That’s it. I don’t understand why people try to needlessly complicate it. It doesn’t give you anything.
My wife will hear a song and go “Oh neat, it’s in 5/8.” And I’m like “How tf do you know that, and why does it matter?”
This is why I prefer to use trackers instead of sheet music when possible. All I want to look at is what pitch the notes are and how long they are. I don’t like key signatures either. It’s better, for me, for each pitch to have its own space.
Songs are made from repeating patterns of beats and melody. The time signature tells you what that pattern looks like. If you just memorise all the notes I suppose it matters less. But if you wanted to improvise like with a guitar solo or whatever that’s the rhythm you can use to improvise with.
It’s the rhythm equivalent of the key/chord progression for the melody. If you know the chord and when/how it changes through a song, and you know the basic rhythm building block you can just make up notes that are guaranteed to sound great with the other instruments playing.
I took piano lessons for many years and I could sight-read sheet music … sorta. As long as the notes were within the staves, I knew exactly what key to play. It was when notes were above and below the staves that I had to stop and count how many little lines were attached to each note to figure it out. Obviously that messed up my rhythm a bit lol.
I’m a programmer and I’ve spent thirty years writing music composition software and I never once even thought about incorporating traditional sheet music representation. It’s just so clunky and poorly designed for the job. And when you start getting into microtones it’s completely hopeless.