In some disciplines I could see it being useful. (Astronomy comes to mind, but only because I happen to be an astronomer.) Oftentimes we need an empirical fit to some data and we don't really care why exactly the fit has the form it does. For instance, you might want to know what the density of a galaxy cluster is as a function of radius. Perhaps you just have an obsession with density profiles, but more likely you need to know what the density profile is for some other purpose (maybe you're looking at the evolution of radio jets in the cluster). In this case you don't really care if your density profile has the correct theoretical function form that a density profile should have; you just care that the empirical fit you use is a close match to the data.
