They’re not worth it to buy, cost wise, but to some people it’s worth it completionist wise to have a full home instance. It’s rather like the gemstore harvesting tools. When you get those it’s not because it will save you money or is cost effective in some way.
Be careful what you ask for
ANet may give it to you.
Since you can invite other people into your home instance, and there’s no limit to how many people can mine your home instance per day, a guild or other friend group could actually get a lot of value out of home instance nodes, or at least a lot more than one person.
I’ll occasionally see people advertising trips into a complete home instance, for free or for a tip. Clearly someone is enjoying them. (Personally, they’re too expensive to interest me, but they’re definitely not pointless. They make people happy!)
~The Storyteller – Elementalist – Jade Quarry~
They make it incredibly easy to just log in and bang out the dailies 
.
“You keep saying ‘its unfair.’
I wonder what your basis for comparison is…”
- Jareth, King of Goblins.
well cost wise they are not worth it unless you look very very long haul
i just like having them
Most wanted in game additions: Beastiary, readable books
It seems like Anet loves to do this thing where they’re like “Hey you can have this cool sustainable source of something but it costs WAY more than you’re going to get out of it!”
Like all the home instance nodes, if you look at the amount of gold you could get instead for the gems they cost, or the sell value of the ones you find in the black lion chest…
Then there’s the candy corn node which costs 5,000 candy corn. It would take what, 1,000+ days to make it up? That’s assuming you mine it every day and you average to like 5 candy corn each day. That’s not worth it, so I guess I’m not going to get the candy corn node.
That’s what I always end up concluding about these home instance nodes. They simply aren’t worth it. They are cool but they might as well not be in the game because they’re not worth getting.
Gem store purchases (with a single, notable exception) are always designed as convenience items, not something that gives you a substantive advantage in progression or profits.
A better question might be: why are people willing to pay relatively more for unbound nodes on the Trading Post? At current prices, the gem store nodes should break even in 2 to 9 years (depending on your choice and assuming markets don’t change a lot, which of course, they will). In contrast, three nodes on the TP will take over 10 years (one of them — elder wood — requiring nearly 20). ANet’s pricing is fixed, but the TP prices depend entirely on the community’s willingness to pay & for some reason, we’re willing to pay more than 800/3 gems for some nodes.
John Smith: “you should kill monsters, because killing monsters is awesome.”
They’re not worth it to buy, cost wise, but to some people it’s worth it completionist wise to have a full home instance. It’s rather like the gemstore harvesting tools. When you get those it’s not because it will save you money or is cost effective in some way.
At least the tools make the game more convenient to play. I ended up getting the big package with all 3 of them and the copper fed salvage kit and some other stuff.
I have a number of nodes in my home instance. Enough that I can get the daily mining in there whenever it comes up. It’s a small convenience, true. But it is one.
Be careful what you ask for
ANet may give it to you.