Terry -- some of us use TAB because if you are at all visual, when you come to doing barre chords or much moving around on the guitar, the chord shapes really help. The chances of my learning and remembering the individual notes of the diminished chords, for instance, are zero -- I can do this with TAB for all of them in microseconds. And so on. I would think TAB is pretty important for most novices who want to use relatively sophisticated chords early on.

yours, Peter T.