Little belated, but eh, I went to sleep,
The only practical use for the data that I can think of is knowing where and when to evacuate. And monitoring the area for that could be done quite cheaply.
There's also stuff crawling out of it, which is... generally it's a good idea to kill that before it gets too far (a
weak one you encounter earlier in the game that got out basically reanimated an entire village of ancient dead into cannibal ghouls just by being in the area), or at least have someone around to tell people further outside there's gribblies coming. Also apparently making advancements in fixing people that get only partially corrupted. And yeah, warning people when a major extrusion is happening. Trying to figure out a way to
close Yog-Sothoth's glory hole. All that kind of nice stuff.
And you'd
think monitoring it would be cheap, but, well. The borders move. Sometimes slowly, sometimes, "Oh hey, the deathlands were a fortnight's walk away when I went to sleep, now we're completely surrounded in all directions." Things crawl out of it. It basically mutates living things that get stuck in it too long and/or eats/drinks anything that's been corrupted. Monitoring outposts they're currently maintaining have to be built underground and perpetually rebuilt, since, y'know, the geography is mutable and occasionally one of the wings and everything in it turn into virulently rapine cheese or somethin'. Building ones further out would require substantial (but, perhaps, less) resources just 'cause you'd have to have more of them to cover the wider border, and there'd
still be the risk the mess decides Tuesday is the day it feels like having a gay ol' flare up and douse a few extra (dozen) miles in soul-devouring hair oil.
Basically, the only non-suicidal course of action is to maintain fairly heavy investment in pretty-close monitoring (and further-out monitoring, too) and what extent of containment (of the non-geography bits of roaming death) is possible. And, well, the land's high-up muckity-mucks are considering... not. And the one that's actually came to the place to check it out has someone managed to
live inside one of (well, to be more precise, the only one that
hasn't spontaneously exploded and/or disappeared,
yet) the in-area monitoring bases for some time
without being irrevocably convinced money needs to be thrown at that shit hand over foot because good goddamn, some things you don't just close your eyes and think of home about, y'ken?