Interestingly doing physics undergrad I never memorised constants, but was annoyed that the only way to succeed in tests was to memorise formulae. Contrastingly you can understand how the systems work which I felt gave a more important level of understanding (e.g. you can fairly intuitively see how things work with momentum, acceleration etc, and with a bit more effort get relativity). Though I suspect in retrospect my main motivation was annoyance that people I felt were less clever or understood less did better by putting in more work memorising and practising than me.