The point of the Event Horizon Telescope (ETH) was actually to attempt to produce something like an image of the black hole at the center of the galaxy, so in a sense it was a pretty-picture mission. The point of this study was to attempt to link up the observations with models in "picture-space".

There are certainly other, less pretty, ways to looks at the data, but producing something that can be intuitively understood, such as a 2D image, can also be helpful scientifically.