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Thauma trauma
Hi PK. Actually, I didn't call anything "silly". I called the lack of any overall skill for experience with magic "funny", in the sense of a bit curious. Not up to the level of silly, and certainly not wrong!
I also don't specify the lack of a required prerequisite skill for spell-learning as the funny bit; that idea is offered as a "how I like to do things" option, just as you suggest. The funny bit would be, again, just the long-running absence of any skill for magical understanding, even after the rules specified good uses for such a skill. From the start, the game gave mages an IQ+Magery roll to sense magic, though with no allowance for the experience of an ancient mage with a hundred spells vs that of a teen wizard with Ignite Fire. GURPS Magic later offered magical research and invention rules, but again, with zero consideration of the ancient mage's experience.
The fun thing about magic, of course, is that any setup is perfectly valid! A particular gameworld could work like the above, pegging success in magical research to innate talent alone, with experience counting for nothing. But I think few GMs would prefer that as the system's default assumption, especially when the game offers invention rules for other fields that are all about experience. If a game had rules for inventing new chemicals that called on IQ, but made no allowance for skill and expertise with chemistry, well, I'd cheerfully call that funny.
That's the game's past, though; Thaumatology eventually appeared (GURPS Grimoire?), and is now there to handle the magical research problem (if not the matter of sensing magic; I don't see it suggested as replacing the IQ+Magery roll for that). The skill is a good addition to the game. I should probably change the article's opening words from "GURPS is funny..." to "GURPS was long funny...".
Re skill name: Thaumatology it is, on B225. And there's a whole book by that name too (which I don't have). Hmm, was it Thaumatology way back in Grimoire, too, or was it the Thaumaturgy that I had fixed in the brain? Either way, thanks for the correction! Will update the article.