Am I wrong or are these evaluations, while interesting, not really meaningful for anyone doing serious development work?

As a non-designer trying to build something solo, I think value's in the higher-tier models being able to brainstorm and infer a variety of design directions, as well as dissect the "this looks off" comments that would frustrate human designers.

Some of the frontend design skills try to bridge the gap, but the better models perform far better as is, and often better without one of those frontend design skills trying to ram their own workflows in.