in trying to learn the chords to some songs i like, i think i figured out the reason why perfect pitch isn't as helpful as people think it is. the biggest challenge for me when hearing a chord is making out the individual notes from this magical cloud of sound. even if i had perfect pitch, i would still have to extract which notes are being played, which might be super easy for the top and bottom notes, but it's the ones in the middle where it's hard to even hear what's going on. does that make sense?
people with absolute pitch tend to be alarmingly bad at hearing chords. that's just something i've noticed. probably not always true, but absolute pitch certainly does not help with chords