Andrew Sarangan wrote:

I never understood why holding patterns are so damn important. I have
received a holding clearance only once in my life.

I get them once in a while around New York. Sometimes it's for flow
control, but sometimes it's to meet LOA's. Departing HPN to the
northeast, you typically get vectors to Carmel VOR. There seems to be
an LOA which requires you to cross Carmel at or above 5000 before being
handed off to the next controller. On a hot summer day, sometimes I
can't make 5000 and I get to climb in a hold until I do.

Oddly enough, I've never gotten "cross CMK at or above 5000" as part of
my clearance, but if I'm not at 5000 by the time I get there, I can
pretty much count on getting a hold.

As often as not, the holding instructions (whether for the CMK climb or
for anything else) will be something like "just give me a couple of left
360's right there". I would suggest not trying to demonstrate one of
those on a checkride, though :-)

Why are they required for the recency experience and the checkride?

I suspect in part because they're used so infrequently. Things you
don't do very often are the things you tend to forget and thus need to
practice.

Also, why are the entry procedures so important?

In theory, if you don't use the proper entry, you may stray out of the
protected airspace. However, the protected airspace is so large
compared to the turn radius of a spam can, it's usually not a real
problem.

On the other hand, a lot of the published en-route holds around New York
have notations like "max holding speed 210 kts" (obviously not a problem
for you or me). I can only assume that the limit the holding speed so
they can reduce the size of the protected airspace. In a situation like
that, using the correct entry may indeed be important.