I love C, it's my favorite language.... but there is no way that pointers are important enough that not knowing them == bad programmer. There are plenty of good developers who've never even had to deal with pointers, even in 2012.
Well, it's necessary to the small extent that you need to know whether something is passed by value or passed by reference. And in order to understand that, you need to at least know what a pointer is. I don't think it's fair to say that "plenty of good developers" haven't ever needed to think about pointers. Maybe in newer languages they won't fall victim to a few of those "symptoms", but they at least need to know what they are.
Ah, so the pass-by-value vs pass-by-reference is a different topic IMHO than int *x or &x. The implementation of both I'm sure are extremely similar if not exactly the same, but I agree that if a developer doesn't understand pass-by-value vs pass-by-reference then that's a serious problem.
I'm probably showing my age that I consider the pass-by-reference concept in modern languages something that hides the concept of pointers rather than something that indicates the understanding of them. Get off my lawn, etc.
I love C, it's my favorite language.... but there is no way that pointers are important enough that not knowing them == bad programmer. There are plenty of good developers who've never even had to deal with pointers, even in 2012.