This sort of thing seems to me to be just you stumbling on the spaced repetition effect by accident: you look up the same thing several times, at varying intervals as you learn it more.
I personally think multiplication is actually a great thing for spaced repetition if you can get the software to pick random numbers each time. I also find that things that I don't review regularly just fall out of my head, spaced repetition software is good for just stopping that relatively easily.
Speaking only for myself, learning things rote, via software-driven spaced repetition or otherwise, is deadly dull. On the other hand, finding new patterns, reading relevant books and deconstructing their arguments, holding discussions with other people passionate about a subject, trying to construct new ideas and relate them to past knowledge, etc. is exciting and invigorating. Living life as a human rather than a robot may be less than perfectly efficient relative to some platonic ideal, but really, so what? Similarly, I’d much rather go on a hike than run on a treadmill, I’d much rather cook and eat a delicious meal than compute the perfect mixture of nutrients and blend them into a shake–slurry, and I’d rather make one deep friend than fill a rolodex with business cards. My personal impression from having dabbled with spaced repetition software after a friend bugged me about it for months was that I personally learn better when learning things doesn’t feel like a visit to the dentist. Call it a character flaw. Again, YMMV.
My point about the multiplication tables and spelling lists though was that explicitly learning e.g. multiplication tables is pretty much unnecessary, because multiplying small numbers comes up again and again in doing more exciting and challenging problems, and by the 20th time you’ve had to multiply 6*8 through some explicit manual method, you’ll just start to remember that oh yeah, that’s 48 again.
While I agree that rote learning is very dull, it can be fundamental in situations where you know next to nothing of the subject at hand.
Consider for example two native English speakers, one learning German and the other learning Chinese. German grammar is way more complex than Chinese's, but because of the etymological closeness between German and English, the German student will quickly get to the point where they can easily pick up new words from the context (obviating the need for vocabulary lists), while the Chinese student will pretty much never reach that. In this type of situation an SRS is invaluable.
Regarding multiplication tables, you shouldn't forget that knowing them by heart is sometimes necessary for understanding the exciting problems. This comes up all the time in mathematics: to understand the important problems in a field, you sometimes have to get to know well a lot of seemingly boring concepts.
Knowing multiplication tables by heart is never necessary for understanding exciting problems; the exciting problems are not dependent on your arbitrary culturally-contingent choice of numeric base! I had discovered the commutative and associative properties of multiplication long before memorizing multiplication tables in fourth grade, and historically speaking, they were known long before the adoption of place-value numerical systems.
I personally think multiplication is actually a great thing for spaced repetition if you can get the software to pick random numbers each time. I also find that things that I don't review regularly just fall out of my head, spaced repetition software is good for just stopping that relatively easily.