Lol, trust me, all your hard work will not be "for nothing". I really enjoy 3D modeling for its own sake. This is a kind of object that I'd never tried before, and I learned a great deal and had a lot of fun in doing it.
IMO with every model you make you will become better than you were before, and learn new methods and shortcuts to achieve the effect you are striving for.

Someone recently posted a picture of a ship's bulkhead light in the Wings forum and asked how they might go about modeling it. In order to explain it, I actually had to build the model which I offered to the person. Even though they changed their minds and ended up using a different style of light, I did not feel I had wasted my time. With a little modification the "bulkhead light" became a Sci-fi skyscraper I plan to use in a future pic. It's a shape I might never have come up with on my own, and very different than any building design I'd come up with before.