In fact, the decision to play the keyboard or not stems from music is intended for being played by humans. Indeed, if you analyse european composers from centuries, you see that the majority of their products is piano friendly (except for those who have very very big hands ;-) ). Eveyone could imagine anything but making a masterpiece and to make its interpretation in real life possible by humans, that is THE real challenge ! So, I advise you to write harmony exercices for example, with two notes in the upper staff for Soprano and Alto, and two notes in the lower one for Tenor and Bass voices, like Bach did and even if one or the other part can be done by the other hand... And if it sounds good, you did the job...

'Some musicians swear a keyboard is the fastest way to see harmony. Others say you can understand harmony deeply without ever touching one.'

Both these things can be true. 'Fastest' doesn't mean 'only', and 'overrated' versus 'essential' are not the only two choices. I guess I'm just pissing into the wind complaining about poorly-designed questions on a casual poll. :) But I don't like false binaries, and the polls on this site often trade in them, which I think fosters narrow thinking.

I believe the piano keyboard is a great, valuable tool for visualizing and exploring key concepts like how chords and scales are built, and for visualizing and exploring harmonic relationships and movements between chords, and I recommend any musician to learn at least a little piano for those reasons. So, it's definitely not overrated. However, to me, that doesn't fit the definition of essential, which means that is is REQUIRED for understanding and carries with it the connotation that we wouldn't even HAVE such understanding without it. There are many, many ways to visualize and talk about these things.

No offense to whoever is doing these, but most of these questions are rather poorly designed...

It's just AI generated