What Use Is An F-call?

What use is an F-call? Recently I participated in my first amateur radio contest. In short, it was a blast! One thing I noticed was that several amateurs I speak to on-air regularly were not there and I'd heard a few people say that "Contesting is not my thing". I respect that, but I'm also a little disappointed by it because it was a lot of fun. I started thinking about it a little and wondered what else might be occurring that could account for some of this. I'm sure that part of it is that you might not actually have ever participated in a contest and it might be that you have no idea how it works, so you feel left out before you begin. Let me give you a fly-over view of a contest, not a specific one, just the notion of what's happening on air. The idea is that you count and log your contacts. Every time you make a new contact, you log the time and date, frequency and mode and of course the call-sign of the station you contacted. You also give the other station a unique number and they give yo