It is a practice that leads, as a consequence, to insight. Insight is not information that might be read from a book, it is experience that uses observation to arrive at understanding and transformation. You can't just "decide to have" the experience without doing the work of transforming yourself through observation. People who have gone far in the practice do tend to say that there was never any goal to begin with, that they ended up where they started, but that's more of a metaphor than anything else. Someone who travels around the world and ends up where they started is in a very different place than someone who never left home.

It's a practice. There are benefits. It's not a cure-all. The goal is to be more in control and aware of your own thoughts and feelings. You achieve that by learning to turn off the "monkey mind" - the continuous stream of distracting thoughts and feelings which can lead us down paths which are not of our deliberate choosing and not necessarily beneficial to our wellbeing.

It is often said that if you go into meditation with a goal to improve yourself that you will probably be disappointed. I guess I would say that meditation is as much about unlocking your intuition as it is about anything else, so consciously trying to improve yourself through meditation does seem to miss the point of the practice.

Correct. Meditation is really a state. Formal practices just aim to help you get there.