Mapping stars and especially mapping planets turned out to be really important for the development of astronomy. Constellations turn out to be a useless concept. Asking lots of people what constellations they see or where they think the boundaries are would have been wasted astronomical effort.

To return to the real topic under discussion: It might be the case that values are useless and we should only talk about preferences, or somesuch. I am agnostic on this point; I wanted to give an example of how some concept might turn out to be not worth collecting empirical data on.