I'm trying to teach myself how to sniff and interact with i2c hardware on consumer products. I'm doing this by attempting to connect my standing desk to the internet. Literally the whole goal is to have a "make desk go up" and "make desk go down" button in my Home Assistant.
That's far from useless though. There have been times where I've wished that I had an I2C expert so I could say "this thing is acting weird. Here's a bus analyzer and there's the code. Go fix it."
There's definitely a difference between the utility of the final project/product and the utility to you personally based on what you learned/had fun with/got paid for along the way.
The real goal is learning to sniff i2c though.