I was obsessed with these kinds of maps when I was a kid. Sometimes 90's computer games would include intricate ones, I remember Ultima IX Ascension came with a quality cloth map I spent hours memorizing.
Yeah, there's something about a map for a kid. I remember carefully studying the ones in J.R.R. Tolkien's books.
I always breezed past them, acknowledging that they were interesting in abstract but I wouldn't retain enough for it to actually colour the story. Mostly the story conveys the things I care about (terrain/distance/etc) and knowing that cities c and f were actually quite close together wasn't important.
Same here. I would like to see a version of the LOTR/Hobbit that has a "minimap" somewhere in the margins when locations are mentioned.