Why is applying textures so difficult?

Hi, I have been using blender for many many years now, infrequently, just to sketch certain things from time to time. I feel like every time I use the texturing tools I have the same problem year after year. I have a sphere with a uv mapped image applied, which works fine. I then decide to try a procedural texture instead of the image based texture, and for the life of me I CANNOT FIGURE IT OUT. I change the texture to my procedural texture I generated, yet nothing happens. The image texture remains on the object and I cannot change it. I’ve ran across this problem many times before, and i have to relearn the obscure idiosyncrasies of blender to get it working. Does it really need to be so complicated?
Frustratedly, thanks for any help.

ANSWER:
Textured objects must be viewed in Render Mode not Texture Mode. While the name “Texture Mode” in blender may lead you to believe you can in fact view Textures, apparently it only applies to image textures, and not procedural textures. Because of Blenders obscure idiosyncrasies, procedural textures are for some reason only viewable in Render Mode. Bloody hell.

Sure, indeed… materials, shaders, lighting & look development are lately better/faster done through interactive viewport.
This can help… Procedural Grunge Shader in Cycles (has very thorough explanation on all things relative)

Or maybe it’s just because in our mind models are already textured, lighted & rendered and we’re just manipulating, controlling & waiting for hand to transfer all the data to the machine ;)… handling ideas just takes time