Presumably simply letting time pass in every step's state along this process is gathering meaningful data. Jumping directly to "well we crashed the helicopter"

Presumably simply letting time pass in every step's state along this process is gathering meaningful data. Jumping directly to "well we crashed the helicopter" would deprive you of answering questions like "how does the solar collector perform there?" "how are the heaters performing day after day?" "how does the helicopter fare resting on the surface throughout the varying conditions?" "Can we see a dust storm's effects on the airframe at rest and solar panels before flight maybe?" "how are the communications going? are they reliable in a dust storm?" That's just off the top of my head... Don't forget Ingenuity is primarily a tech demo and learning mission, they're just gathering data and informing future flight-centric missions. I think it's obvious that you'd leverage every pre-flight step as much as you possibly can, since flight has such a high risk of destroying the vehicle.