That's how I remember it. I know I had to take calculus twice, but passed analysis the first time. To be fair, this is 20+ years ago and my memory sucks at the best of times.

Looking at it now, I think maybe I just found it too boring to remember the tricks, and too tedious to not make mistakes, while I found coming up with proofs more "interesting" and requiring less rote memorization.

Ah, for sure pure math is much more enjoyable to learn. I'm glad you find math interesting. Especially as a writer; that's really cool. Sorry for my previous comment.

I wish the university calculus changed the curriculum. I didn't find it particularly useful to learn how to integrate e.g. inverse trig given that WolframAlpha exists. There are lots of other examples of teaching memorization of silly tricks like that. I guess they probably do it because it's easy to test.

No offense taken, I totally understand that it can come across as odd. I hope my clarification makes more sense. Once I learned more about say, why leibniz and newton came up with their formulations, and what say, the inverse of the square root of the determinant of the jacobian actually allows one to formulate (how a space "dilate" when a continuous distortion is applied to it, for example), calculus (applied calculus) became a much more interesting topic for me.

While I only got so far in proving stuff about a cyber-physical I was working on, but this was really fun to learn: https://github.com/LS-Lab/KeYmaeraX-release

See also: http://lfcps.org/lfcps/