If you live on the coast, following the details of the forecasts and warnings is extremely important. But my experience living a little over 100 miles inland taught me that the hurricane category is a useful predictor to some extent: anything below category 3 would weaken enough on its way inland that it wasn't a higher risk than routine severe thunderstorms, and didn't require any special advance preparations. The winds would merely be coming from a different direction than usual for our area, and only the areas usually prone to flash flooding had to worry about the volume of rain. It's location-specific, but it is possible to usefully distill the local risk profile down to something where the hurricane category tells you whether it's time to start worrying about that storm.

You don’t sound like the average person; perhaps you could even be a local authority :)