Messing with the registry generally isn't worth it.
I am a "local computer repair guy", and while I wouldn't say *every appointment* involves a dive into the registry, I'd say without a shadow of a doubt at least 33% of them do, even if it's to go to a really common location like HKLM > Software > Microsoft > Windows > CurrentVersion > Run, because it's quicker than running the sysinternals utility 'autoruns' and waiting for a scan to complete. Having said that, autoruns has speeded up my work considerably.
I would also add that the more one knows about Windows, the less reinstalls one has to do. Considering that a pretty good definition of the registry would be a "central repository of Windows settings", I wonder how you can possibly make the statement I quoted. It's where (almost) all the settings are found. Without the registry editor one is reliant on third party apps and the OS GUI to make registry alterations.
I think if a decent course for mastering Windows was designed (ie. for people who know how to use Windows as a user already), a significant portion of it would be dedicated to the registry. Perhaps a third, maybe more, I don't know.
For example, a problem I've seen on plenty of occasions but doesn't happen all the time is "Hmm, the optical drive seems to have disappeared from the list of drives". One of the first places I check is the 'UpperFilters' and the 'LowerFilters' settings in the registry. It's almost a guarantee that some retarded program which has something to do with CD ripping or writing has malfunctioned. Follow that up with uninstalling the device from Device Manager and redetecting it, problem fixed in less than five minutes.
Back to the OP though - a friend taught me quite a bit of the basics, key registry locations, manipulating service behaviour, service dependencies, permissions. I wonder whether I had an additional advantage to someone learning Windows now in that I started 'getting serious' with Windows with NT4, which I would consider to be the bare bones of the NT line up to the current version. I think it's easier to see why MS introduced technologies like WMI when you see what Windows was like without them. To use a car analogy (everyone loves computer <-> car analogies!), it's like learning the insides of a car back when they weren't packed with electronics.
Since that friend's initial teaching, the knowledge I've built up since has been mostly the result of researching specific problems and then fixing them and/or the base of those initial teachings.
I would ask you 'Why?' as well, because I think it takes quite an unusual person to learn something thoroughly without a specific need for that knowledge.
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