There are plenty of people who love chess but hate opening theory. They look to variants such as chess960 to get their logician fix on. They also tend to love Go (the board game) and perhaps even Stratego (which has such a game tree that dwarfs the rest).
It's not a lame dichotomy. There are loads of people who detest rote memorization and prefer to solve only the problem directly in front of them. Bobby Fischer himself invented his variant because he hated that aspect of the game. I, personally, empathize with this position as a university student who gets higher grades in pure math courses than in the "easier" applied versions due to the memorization aspect.
