> So what if it missed NYC?

There is a very significant economic impact during high-impact weather-related decision making. The city of NY is missing out on a huge amount of money due to the "poor planning" - additionally, so is the rest of the world if flights were cancelled that did not need to be cancelled. Decision making is important in NYC, and providing the best possible information to the decision makers is a critical aspect of modern meteorology.

Maybe you don't care that it missed NYC, but Delta cares. Minimum wage workers who couldn't get to work and missed a shift care. The Mayor cares. etc.

But the problem is a problem of planning for uncertainties. Let's say you know its 50/50 chance of a "bad storm" and you have to make a decision to flip the "emergency prep" switch. You now have four possibilities with associated costs. (and that's a drastically simplified analysis)

With the right data, you can come to some level of statistically optimized set of decisions, but that won't ever completely eliminate the instances when you turn on emergency actions, but the storm doesn't follow up. It merely minimizes them...

Really, if all these private and public entities care about the accuracy of forecasts, maybe they should have made more noise when NOAA programs were being gutted during the budget process and long term decisions were being made about satellite programs... I can't imagine what the handwringing will be if the satellite coverage gaps come to pass. Maybe we'd actually learn that certain investments in common needs actually pay off quite well.

Accuracy would be great, but I don't believe accuracy existed; wasn't there still a great deal of uncertainty?

Most people don't do any real work anyway (just fake, fluffy work that seem like work). So they didn't get paid. So it didn't get wasted. Economy impact positive, not negative.