I can't agree with you, even the econ phd program at University of Minnesota use Stokey, Lucas & Prescott, 1989 as the primary textbook. As soon as you get used to the language of that book, it is not that hard as your first glance, and on the same time, those tricky maths are really important for macroeconomic research, especially for truly understanding about the model, why the model has a solution, and so on. I hold the same view as you before, but after taking Chari's course on Macro, I realized that this is the most efficient (despite somewhat a torture) way to build up my analytical sense. Read a lot of stuff before going into the core a subject really isn't a good way to start, and sometimes it is totally a waste of time, you may enjoy what you do, but it may be biased, that is my personal experience, anyway.
On the other hand, for reading RMT, I found that some sense in time series analysis is important, and Hamilton, 1989 is certainly a important reference for this field.
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