a reason why chord theory matters for guitarists--translating a traditional tune into a bottleneck technique arrangement requires you to know your chord forms

Decades ago when I was in college and studying basic harmony and voice-leading I recall a fairly usual concern  coming up, "When are we ever going to use this?"  What's the point of learning root, first inversion and second inversion chord formations? At the time the instructor of the course said, "Well, there's no practical use to it at all, unless you want to be a musician."  That was the simplest answer a professor could give but as a guitarist I have had time to encounter, in my own experiments as a guitarist, plenty of real world reasons why knowing chord theory matters.  Let me give a for-instance that shows why you have to know your basic root, first inversion, and second inversion chord forms in order to do anything with bottleneck technique (more after the break).