I would argue sadly in this economy it is not. I don't think you should be learning how to model and texture, but you absolutely should be learning how 3d data, textures, materials, metadata and so on are structured. Specifically you should understand matrix multiplication, traversing rigs and scene hierarchies, float array and integer array buffers for face index and vertex data, and so on. The list is very very long, and unless you are purely like, an online account web dev or cross platform bit twiddler which I feel is greatly decreasing in value (and is very competitive because of 40 years of bit twiddlers before you), then you absolutely need to be doing this stuff. Once you've done all that, you'll find the modeling part isn't even so far away from you for hard surfaces at least, but organic is truly its own life quest. You're right on that part.