Fact you don't think a feature is useless for your, doesn't automatically makes the feature useless for everybody else. Everything in the simulator, of course, contributes to the immersion and everything, if you really think about it, is just pretending as well so, everybody might have his own idea of that is useless and what isn't.
If the EIA website didn't start to act strange two days ago, we wouldn't even be having this conversation (this feature has been there for years, even in P3D) and of course, the error has been dealt correctly now in the 3.0 update so yes, it will use a default price of 3.5, which it's what it always did when the site was unreachable, now it will do it even if the site it's alive, but returns strange errors, which I think are bugs in the API.