I suspect that people desire to internalize these skill merely because they can

Yes, sort of like how people desire to breathe merely because they can. To say that a skill is useful only prompts the question: useful for what? Your goal system has to ground out somewhere; at some point you need some conception of a life worth living and a work worth doing, that don't need to be justified in terms of anything else, or else why should why should we care about being useful? Cf. Eliezer's "High Challenge" and Nick Bostrom's "The Future of Evolution."