Would you improve if the content required it?

[Zojha]

Take the Echidna fight in Void Ark. Tanks who have memorized the fight will go to the right places when she splits into three. Tanks who haven't tend to end up badly placed. Tanks who can adapt will move when paired with tanks who mess this up; tanks who have only memorized just sit there yelling because "that's how it's always done".

I'd beg to be more precise - In order to be able to adapt to the bad positioning, you first need to have memorized the spread mechanic. You need to access the stored knowledge in your brain that the adds are supposed to be split as far away as possible. That's memorization - if you don't know or forgot about that, you might just tank the adds naively where they stand, together in the middle, because why not?

What you are alluding to here is memorizing the wrong thing. They have memorized the position, not the working of the mechanic, so they can naturally only access the knowledge of the position - they do not have the knowledge of the mechanic stored. Error 404, memory not found. And thus, they cannot respond properly until someone gives them the knowledge with a quick:"Spread the adds as much as possible for the debuff to vanish!" They'll put that knowledge into their short-term memory and recall it from there in the next try.

That said, adapting without memorization of the solution to a given problem is going to rely purely on luck. You might do the right thing, you might do the wrong thing. If you ever see someone run away from you with a tether that's meant to make you stack together, chances are he was trying to adapt by recalling the knowledge of the burning chain tether in the Vault and applying it. That's the wrong solution for that tether however and they will need to memorize that fact and the proper solution to boot.

That's why the homogenization of indicators is so immensely helpful. You no longer need to memorize a dozen different indicators for "stack together", you only need to memorize one and whenever you see it, you can solve it with the same behaviour. This allows you to potentially solve a new fight on the first try, whereas if every fight used its own indicators, you'd need to memorize which indicator means what mechanic in which fight.
If you're a mean developer, you can actually play with that and make a fight in which the generic harmful AoE indicator means:"Stack together here". By breaking the consistency, people will be unable to adapt, as the solution they have memorized for these AoE indicators is faulty in this particular case - until they realize the exception and memorize that fact.

[JunseiKei]

That said, adapting without memorization of the solution to a given problem is going to rely purely on luck. You might do the right thing, you might do the wrong thing. If you ever see someone run away from you with a tether that's meant to make you stack together, chances are he was trying to adapt by recalling the knowledge of the burning chain tether in the Vault and applying it. That's the wrong solution for that tether however and they will need to memorize that fact and the proper solution to boot.

That would fall under memorized visual queue, not the mechanic. Rolling Thunder, Burning Chain, Rafflesia's tether (that I have long forgotten the name to) - they all have a debuff on your status bar telling you that you will take damage. Though how and why may differ between fights (damage with each action, including auto and broken by being grounded; damage tick with time and broken with distance from each other; etc.). Unlike Imdugud's tether, which was a soak that had no indication other than, oh look, you visually have a tether (if memory serves me; it's been a while since I stepped into T10, even with Tails) was still different in that sense than the aforementioned tethers. Even in T13 with Flare Star; you got a tether, visually only again, that would come to you and do damage to you, eventually.

So while many mechanics might still look the same or incredibly similar, people don't actively look at things that tend to set them apart and lump them all as the same because it's a line attached to their character on a screen.

[Nora_of_Mira]

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Great, thoughtful posts. Thanks for the input and your perspectives. +1