Is it bad that I fail to see the utility of this?
I mean, all information on weapons (except damage) is already right there and the UFOpaedia doesn't really say anything useful about the aliens.
Bad? No.. but it suggests to me that you haven't taken full advantage of all that OpenXCom offers
It it not really important for a vanilla game, but as soon as you used it with some mods, it becomes interesting. What's the autoshot range of an autocannon in the FMP? What about in XPiratez? Or UFORedux? Do you really want to count the tiles? Or the snapshot range of a sniper rifle in all 3 of the aboves? What about the damage of their alien alloy ammunitions?
They use the same graphics, but they most likely don't share the stats. At some point, it's just too much and I would rather spend hours playing the game than studying the UFOPaedia.
This is especially relevant in mods like Piratez where there is a LOT of weapons and you can use weapons from your enemies, for which you may already have a UFOPaedia entry but never really paid attention since it is the first time you see it.