Counting the number of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, namely RFID counting, is needed by a wide array of important wireless applications. Motivated by its paramount practical importance, researchers have developed an impressive arsenal of techniques to improve the performance of RFID counting (i.e., to reduce the time needed to do the counting). This paper aims to gain deeper and fundamental insights in this subject to facilitate future research on this topic. As our central thesis, we find out that the overlooked key design aspect for RFID counting protocols to achieve near-optimal performance is a conceptual separation of a protocol into two phases. The first phase uses small overhead to obtain a rough estimate, and the second phase uses the rough estimate to further achieve an accuracy target. Our thesis also indicates that other performance-enhancing techniques or ideas proposed in the literature are only of secondary importance. Guided by our central thesis, we manage to design near-optimal protocols that are more efficient than existing ones and simultaneously simpler than most of them.