As someone who's never flown anything bigger than a Cessna, I find the accident reports interesting and helpful. They are a fascinating insight into how things can still go wrong, occasionally updates me on the contest between those designing idiot-proof widgets and the latest improved model idiot as delivered by the universe, and has taught me critical thinking for when I need to do worst-case design. It also helps me when I do get something wrong to understand what I did and why.
It all started when I came close to being in an incident, in that I was on G-VSKY back in 1997 on its trip to LAX (landing gear failed to descend correctly on its return flight to LHR) and I was fascinated by the level of detail in the report. That's an engineering geek for you.