Don't Give Your Users Shit Work
Twitter Lists may not be popular, for exactly the reasons you describe, but they're really useful for two purposes: if you follow a LOT of people (for whatever reason), you can use Twitter for 'people whose posts I actually want to read' and if you use it for news consumption, you can make lists for that.  I use it especially for the latter; being someone who follows iOS jail breaking, 99% of the time, Twitter is the original source for all of the news related to that.