The collate conjecture gets a pass from me because I think there’s an even more funded problem that is even more useless: calculating pi to more and more digits. I doubt any practical application needs more than 10 digits.
It’s proven that Pi is transcendent, while it isn’t proven Collatz always finishes
But what if I want to show off to my friends how smart I am by rattling off a gazillion digits of pi off of the top of my head? I need more than 10 digits to do that...