Something that often comes out is "it is about the journey, not the destination".

Many math problems are practically useless if you only care about the answer, the millennium prize about the Navier-Stokes equation is such a problem. The solution makes no physical sense, real life fluids don't follow the Navier-Stokes equations in such extreme conditions. But in the process of finding the solution, we may get insight into what will end up being really useful. The big mess that OpenAI produced is the solution no one really cared about, but it didn't deliver much of what people actually wanted.

One reason it is sometimes seen negatively despite being at least something is that it broke the incentive. Without the million dollar prize and with only the privilege of being second, people are much less likely to go for the insightful solution.