Can't speak for others, but when I started off the original list, it was so we had a bunch of locations to visit for Earth like planetary landings. I imagined they'd be of special interest to the community.
My main goal with the list was to figure out how Earth-likes might "work", how we can find better ones, any anomalies, and so on. By now, I think this has been achieved as well as it could be - and doing any more research is much better done on the crowdsourced data anyway, as that's both far larger and less biased.
Two fun pieces of history from back then. First off, before this, the predominant thinking was that people should stick to G stars if they wanted to find Earth-likes, because our own Sun is a G star as well. As far as I know, I was the first to make a list of what star classes systems with ELWs had, and that sent that theory away.
Second, your comment about having a bunch of locations to visit for Earth-like planetary landings reminded me that back at Horizons's launch, I said I expected that we'd have landings at least on barren atmospheric worlds in two years. That was the end of 2015. Turns out what we got instead were landings on thin atmospheric planets in 5.5 years. I'm not making any more predictions now
Oh, and on another note: I've added the entries, the list is updated again.