The recovery thing could potentially resolve another K-13/AIM-9B incident, but I'm not sure this will be worthwhile. If you have fuel to return you have fuel to chase the target longer and to go faster. Personally I only see recovery as a useful feature if your weapons are really expensive or you want to create air mines. Which the latter is really a terrifying thought. It wouldn't be hard to have a bunch of drones with explosives create a screen/wall and take out anything that comes close enough. Returning things with explosives on it is also rather dangerous. You arm them when sending them out and if there's a bug they may still be armed when returning.