"The Trotsky vs Stalin conflict doesn't matter anymore."
It absolutely matters, because to this day Marxism-Leninism was never applied to the West.
Only Trotskyism was. Knowingly or not, nearly all "radical Marxists" in the West - whatever they call themselves (Maoists, Hoxhaists, etc.) Have always taken Trotskyism for granted.
Trotskyism can be defined by the following characteristics:
1) Radical arrogance: Rejection of the masses as a political subject, belief that the masses must conform to the assumptions of "intellectuals."
2) "Revolutionary" adventurism: The belief that you have everything figured out, and must now adventuristically conform reality to your consciousness
3) Liquidationism: Trotskyites believe that the revolutionary process liquefies, rather than sublates, all determinations within reality - nations, families, civilizations, etc. - suspending them in permanent negation. Rather than advance civilizations to a higher stage based on the foundation of past achievements, Trotskyites seek to destroy them wholesale, becoming allies with the lumpenized financial bourgeoisie via neoconservatism.
4) Trotskyites reject the reality of collective existence - parties, nations, civilizations - in favor of the purely "individual" reality of ideas and opinions. Trotskyites are sectarians by nature, and their nature, like amoeba, is to split incessantly.
This sectarian disease infected all other Marxists in the "West" - due to a shared inability to comprehend collective existence beyond the thoughts and opinions of individuals.
Trotskyite orgs are forever haunted by Trotsky's own original sin of trying to wreck the Bolsheviks because he didn't get his way.
Now let's compare this to "Stalinism"
1) Marxist-Leninist praxis was always based in radical humility to the masses.
Lenin, Mao, Che, etc. - all initiated a dialogue with the "backward" masses, peasants and farmers, that revealed revolutionary tendencies in ways that contradicted the assumptions of "intellectuals."
2) Marxist-Leninists believed that revolutionary consciousness can only develop in concert with the development of the masses and with reality - that without this, it is merely hot air. Building a foundation among the masses also defines the content of revolutionary consciousness, rather than imposing it on them.
They begin not from the core, but from the rural periphery.
3) Marxist-Leninists reject that the revolutionary process liquidates humanity's past. It regards this process as the logical CULMINATION of a total and integral history. It affirms logical continuity with past conventions, norms, etc. Situating the revolutionary socialist future within the totality of history.
It recognizes the rationality of historical laws, not the hot air of individual arrogance.
4) Marxist-Leninists do not regard the collective as the sum total of individuals, but as a more fundamental principle of existence. It regards this existence as objective, and not reducible to individual opinions or ideas - but a functional principle and logic of association. It affirms the reality of nations, civilizations, etc. - as integral forms of social existence.
While these can develop and change, they develop and change on a firm foundation of accumulated historical development, rather than on the basis of individual consciousness.
So yes - the difference between Trotskyism and Marxism-Leninism ABSOLUTELY still matters and is of dire importance: Because Marxism-Leninism was never even translated into the West.
Tl;dr - in America, all we've had so far is Trotskyism, "real Stalinism has never been tried."