so ive been a general for about 2 years now and people keep telling me to just go ahead and get my extra but honestly every time i look at the question pool it just seems like a ton of really dense theory stuff that i dont really understand and im not sure how much of it actually matters in practice. like the stuff about delta loops and transmission line theory and some of the filter questions... i get that theres more HF privileges with extra but i already have access to most of the bands i actually use. is it worth grinding through all that material just to unlock a few more khz on 75 and 40 meters or whatever it is? and does knowing all that theory actually make you a better operator or is it just trivia for the test

Honestly I put it off for years thinking the same thing and then one weekend I just sat down with the ARRL Extra Class manual and started reading it properly instead of just trying to memorize answers. Took me about 6 weeks studying maybe an hour a night and passed with a 46 out of 50. The theory stuff actually clicked once I stopped fighting it. The transmission line section was rough but once you get the basic concepts the questions make a lot more sense. Whether it makes you a better operator kind of depends on what you do. I build a lot of my own antennas and understanding impedance matching properly made a real difference for me. If you're just doing casual ragchewing maybe less so but I still think it's worth it just to have done it.

the extra khz thing is kind of oversold in my opinion but where it really matters is CW segments and some of the less crowded phone freqs during contests when the general portions are a wall of noise. i upgraded last year mostly just to have it done and yeah the exam was tough in spots, the part about op-amp circuits and some of the oscilator questions got me but i passed first try. use ham study or whatever the flash card site is called, i did like 20-30 questions a day for a month. the theory actually does stick a little bit even if you dont fully understand it going in