There's a balance in these things, and the important thing is to get it right. Sometimes that means concentrating on getting one particular thing right, and leaving the other things aside for the moment.

In itself spelling is pretty arbitrary and of relatively minor importance - after all Shakespeare couldn't even spell his own name the same way twice running. But it does matter, because other people think it matters, and if you spell too oddly you're going to be looked down on and humiliated and be afraid to write things, and if you do write things it's going to be harder for other people to read them.

I suspect that what with spellcheckers and all that, the ability to spell unaided will become less significant as a way of judging other people's competence, in the same way that calculators have made the ability to do long division less significant. And there's a definite downside to that, as well as an upside.

But I'd put the ability to spell accurately a lot lower in the scale of important human skills than the ability to make music, or tell stories.