These facilities are peculiar. They replace the big side draw of Hoenn in an attempt to prep you for the Frontier, but they're so limited in scope and the rewards you get are so shit that they're not worth touching.
I feel like Emerald would've been better off if they were staggered off the contest towns or coexisted and gave an appropriate reward for the area + 1BP for every successful run. Just give some sort of text from Scott being like 'these will be useful later trust me bro' to explain why you'd bother collecting them pre-Frontier.