It isn't wasting time really. I mean a high school student can run the calculation easily (my high school physics class did exactly that). However there are a number of uses for this including predicting the weather of the sun (as things like solar storms and sun flares are good things to know, along with being able to predict when we will have solar winds). So they aren't wasting their time, nor is the misleading information presented by solips a representation of what researchers studying the sun are currently spending their time on.