Michel, I think you've got a point, but it's not always so simple a dichotomy as draft/final. Much as we'd all like to believe we're excellent self-editors, a writer isn't always the best judge of when he's gone right and when he's gone wrong. Sometimes, a failure of nerve leads to the deletion of a startling trope or idea; sometimes an older self censors the work of a younger self (thinking here of Auden and Wordsworth) to the detriment of the earlier version; sometimes, for commercial reasons or just plain ignorance/arrogance, an editor will alter an author's text in ways that make it diverge markedly from the original (John Clare's an excellent example of this; the interference of editors having been so thoroughgoing that modern editors have gone so far as to attempt to restore his poems to their original unpunctuated and misspelled manuscript state, even though there's little evidence, as Clare's biographer Jonathan Bate says, that Clare would have wished his poems published so roughly). For the average reader, no, textual variants aren't terribly important, but for the hardcore enthusiast and scholar, there's a lot to be gained by reading original versions of poems and stories. It's readers after all, not writers, who decide what sticks around and what gets forgotten.