You have it right on the nail for the OP. There is no appeal in a "near perpetual" motion machine because the whole appeal is the perpetual and thus free energy potential of the machine.

To put it into financial terms like another comment did. A perpetual motion machine is like a 100% guaranteed return of some value on every investment, it's great because regardless of how much you put in you're eventually going to make more than that. A "near perpetual" motion machine on the other hand is like a really really small loss guaranteed on every investment (or even better a net positive of $0 value on every investment) which while obviously better than a big loss is still trivially easy to understand as non-valuable / of no real interest to much of anyone.