Like you, I focus more on the reading, listening, and speaking. I do think it is worth the time to understand the basics in how they are written, but I won't spend too much time on it. If I am still studying Chinese a few years from now, then maybe I will get more into it.

  That's what I do, reading, listening and speaking. I'm rarely asked to write anything and if I am it's no big deal if I can't. The only practical reason I can see for learning to write is that I believe it would help solidify language I am trying to absorb and remember. It would be nice to be able to write though, it's a very beautiful language to read. Just can't be arsed, that's all.

Is up to how long you plan to be in China. If will spend at least 2 years I think it worths to learn to write.

Anyway, I studied first saying I just wanted to talk and listen. I did learn, then I started learning to read and I did learn. When I started learning to write the language came as a huge waterfall and everywhere I found more and more known characters.

In my experience learning to write is a must when learning chinese, even if u dont write n just type u understand language in another level than people who can't write.

It can be useful and even enjoyable. One time I needed to take a taxi home and the driver pretended not to be able to understand me when I said it so I wrote it down. He couldn't play dumb after seeing my (rather nice) written Chinese characters. 

It's not only useful but it also helps your reading, for me at least it's a lot easier to remember a character if I write it down.

I would say it depends on what level of Chinese you want to master. As you start to learn more and more characters, you'll realize a lot of them will look somewhat similar. After a while you'll begin to confuse them if you only know how to recognize them, but if you learn how to write them, you'll discern the differences much easier. If you want to reach a high level of Chinese I'd say learn to write the characters too. Sometimes, I only know the characters if they are in pairs. Example.    比赛 competition 赛车 race car 塞车 traffic jam. Sometimes it's easy to confuse the "sai" because it looks similar, and because it has a similar pronunciation (different tone), but they have different meanings.

Some more examples are 瀑布 爆炸  屏幕 暴力 羡慕. I know these vocabularies when they are paired together, but notice how there's one character in each pair which looks similar... if I take those similar characters and write them individually in a line 瀑 爆 幕 暴 慕... now for some reason I have no idea how to pronounce them and don't know what they mean haha. But I realized if you learn how to write the characters, you'll be able to recognize each one individually as well, which is helpful when learning Chinese at an advanced level.

There are some rules when learning how to write characters. I don't think that it's important to be able to hand write characters. However, a thorough knowledge of how characters are formed and, in particular, the radicals will help you to firstly group characters by meaning and then remember them. 

The HSK doesn't even test handwritten characters anymore, it is all done on the computer through typing. However, any character I know how to write is much easier to remember when reading.

I think... Felty is right.

Also, if you learn to write them, then it should become easier to read other people's handwriting. If you're only used to the clean clear computer/phone version, then it can be damn hard to read it when someone writes cursively.

It might help with reading, but I can't remember the last time I had to hand write something. I've forgotten how to write most characters. It's a nice skill to have, and if you're learning Chinese you might as well learn, but maybe don't get too hung up on it.

No, not at all.

Only today I was asked why I don't learn Chinese and I responded by asking "why should I?"

Imagine my surprise when the lady answered "Because you live here!"

That's only about the fifth time I've encountered a Chinese person who could answer (much less understand) any question I've asked in the almost six years I've lived here.

I digress...my answer;  No, not at all.