I agree, except that it would free up brainpower to work on other problems, and that it would allow more confidence in cryptosystems that rely on an NP-hard pro

I agree, except that it would free up brainpower to work on other problems, and that it would allow more confidence in cryptosystems that rely on an NP-hard problem being exponential time (but I don't think factoring a large product of two primes like could break RSA, is NP-hard). A resolution P=NP would likely have a huge practical effect, but most people don't expect that to happen.