It seems to me that when most people start to learn guitar, they learn just the chord shapes and not necessarily how the notes work to-gether to form the chord. I'd wager that that's true for almost all self-taught guitarists (at least initially), and I'm no exception. I didn't really understand chord construction until 2011, but I started playing guitar in 2009.
I think the reason that most guitarists learn chords first is that chords have an immediate payoff. You don't really have to understand the note intervals involved in a chord; as long as you can make your fingers form the shape, you can get a decent sound out of your instrument. Learning the chord shapes is a sort of instant gratification. It's not exactly instant, as getting your fingers to form the shapes is sometimes a bit difficult (B major is particularly difficult at first), and it takes a while to be able to transition between chords smoothly.
While it's certainly not a clear cut distinction, I feel that - for the most part - you can determine a guitarist's seriousness by whether or not he understands how chords are constructed. If he's focused merely on the shapes, he's probably just playing for fun (and there's no-thing wrong with that), but if he's at least attempting to understand the logic behind the shapes, playing guitar is probably more than just a hobby.
So for me, figuring out how to construct a chord with the third on the bottom (even if it was initially by accident) reaffirms that I'm taking this seriously and not just duplicating the chords shapes I've seen illustrated. Based on the knowledge I've gleaned from those common chord shapes and what I learned about music theory from the piano class I had in 2011, I'm trying new things, and they're working.
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