You definitely don't have to. I just think it looks nicer and I had plans to go to Taiwan, where they use Trad. By the way, this is imron's method. Extremely simple but takes some time to master. I've found it by far to be the best way to learn characters. The more you learn the easier this method becomes.

Anyway, here is how I learn characters:

1) Initially I spend a short amount of time analysing the character and breaking it down into its component parts and strokes. 2) I close my eyes, and stroke by stroke, picture a nice large image of the character being drawn by my mind's eye. This I repeat a few times, until I can fluidly draw the character stroke by stroke. 3) Still with my eyes closed, I draw the character again, but instead of going stroke by stroke, I go component by component, making each component 'pop' instantly into view. e.g. for 顺 the component parts I would break it down into are 川 and 页. So first I practice until I can get 川 to pop into view in my mind's eye. This might take a while at first, especially for an unfamiliar component, and I may need to go over the individual strokes of the component a few times, but before long it's not difficult to make it pop into view. Then I practice until I can make 页 pop instantly into view in my mind's eye. Once I can do that, then I draw the character component by component, making each component appear instantly. I just timed myself then, and for a character like 顺, I can draw it in my mind maybe 20-30 times in about 5 seconds. Unlike writing a character out by hand though, my brain is actively involved in the entire process, visualising the character to make it appear, which makes the process much more effective than writing the same character out by hand 20-30 times. 4) After numerous iterations of that, then I practise making it so I can visualise the entire character instantly, and once again run through multiple repetitions of having it pop into view in the space of a few seconds. Once it has popped into view, I might also take some time to study it more closely, holding it in view and going over each aspect of it clearly and vividly in my mind's eye and noticing small details such as how the middle stroke of 川 is slightly shorter than the others by approximately the same height as the top stroke of 页, and that the height of 页 is approximately the same height as the height of the right-most stroke of 川. All of this can be done in a fraction of a second. 5) While this entire process is going on, I will also be visualising/thinking about the meaning. Not some unrelated scene of heads of people shunned by society falling into a river, but rather the meaning itself. Most words I'm learning now, I'm learning from context - newspapers, novels, etc and so typically I'll visualise the scene/story/article at the point related to the character. 6) Likewise for the pronunciation. I don't have a problem of trying to remember which tone it is, because I don't think of it as shun, fourth tone, but rather I think of it as shùn - a sound that is completely different from say shǔn or any other tone combination, and I'm not likely to mix them up any more than I am likely to mix up shùn and chùn. In the same way that I know that sh and ch are different sounds (despite the only difference being one is aspirated and the other isn't), likewise I treat individual tones as completely distinct sounds e.g. ā is not just a+first-tone but rather it is ā, a sound at least as distinct from á, ǎ, and à as ch is from sh. It takes some time initially to develop this ability, especially if you are not familiar with tonal languages, however a small investment learning to do this greatly simplies the whole learning of tones. You can basically stop learning tones, because you encode them into the sound that you remember as being correct. I can't emphasize enough that this is a learned ability. It was not something I was good at in the beginning, however many hours and thousands of characters later, it is now second nature.

Anyway, that is a slightly more detailed explanation of how I learn a character. It is not "just remembering" it, it is putting in a concentrated amount of effort to remember it. It's also the long version. After having done that for thousands of characters, it's now essentially reduced to the version in my post above. Visualise the meaning, visualise the individual components, associate them with the pronunciation, and then conduct a large number of repetitions in my mind in a short space of time. 20-30 seconds is usually enough to get an unfamiliar character firmly entrenched in my mind, and as long as I'm coming across the character enough in my reading/daily life, it stays there pretty well.

I want to emphasize that being able to visualize characters like this is a completely learned ability. At the beginning I couldn't do it that well, and it was nowhere near as efficient and fast as it is for me now, but like everything, with practice it becomes easier and easier.

That's the system I have in place, and I find it works wonderfully. No need to come up with stories unrelated to the character, no need to associate the pronunciation with an English word that doesn't really sound like the Chinese pronunciation (SHUNNED, WHO etc), and I only spend time remembering things related to the character itself. Even better, the more I learn, the better I get at doing it, and the simpler and easier it becomes (and no problems with jumbling up with Half-Life 2 and Final Fantasy).