Am i wasting my time learning to write Chinese characters?

My journey with Chinese initially started when i lived there and I was doing the Anki deck "Spoonfed Chinese", which im sure some of you are familiar with. I spent most of the day doing it, testing myself on every phrase, i would only pass it if i looked away from my monitor and was able to write the characters out just by hearing the sentence. It was boring as hell, but I learned a lot, went through a lot of paper too.

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A friend of mine decided he would only learn to read the characters and made waaaaaaaaaay more progress than I did, by the end of the year he was close to fluent good. Covered far more of the deck than i did, but couldn't handwrite the characters, only type them on a pinyin keyboard.

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I took a GCSE exam when i got home because i needed a language GCSE to get into university, and i was glad that I had took the time to learn to write because the tests were handwritten. Fast forward to today and I'm studying International Business and Chinese at university and got bumped up to the second year class because i had a good level to begin with. However all of my exams have been done on the computer using pinyin and im using a computer more and more. I've been debating blowing the dust off that old deck, or potentially doing more stuff on the computer like Duolingo or Memrise, but the issue of writing is playing on my mind. If i commit to just typing then i can cover a lot more ground, and im beginning to think that in our modern era writing is just unnecessary, i even have the google pictograph drawing system on my phone so i wouldn't forget how to write characters but after typing on the computer the pinyin keyboard looks a lot more tempting.

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I just looked it up and I saw that you can do HSK 6 on a keyboard, so im beginning to wonder if there's any point in me putting myself through the effort.

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I want to know your opinions on the matter, also, i have debated buying one of these (https://goo.gl/images/gHMkKo), has anyone used one to remember how to write the characters instead of a pinyin Keyboard? How do you remember how to handwrite characters? Is it useful in this day and age? What's your experience?

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