I'm no expert on airflow and race cars, but my understanding is that hood scoops allow for a) better passive cooling of the engine and/or b) better combustion through ram air intake. And, of course, many people think it looks great, and that should not be undersold.
On a 4R, you can use a snorkel to route the air intake to avoid dust and water (which this does not achieve, as far as I can tell), but I'm unaware of the passive cooling benefits (as mentioned above, the 4R doesn't normally operate with high engine temps) and I don't know anything about higher combustion (this seems unrelated to intake; see someone's thread ((wfo?)) on the turbo/supercharger install if you want to see about someone doing engine tuning in a 4R.)
So, what's left is looks, and a lot of people here don't like it, but like you said that's what you should probably expect on a forum. As to the functionality I'm not sold that it performs any of the normal objectives (nor that these are feasible to achieve on the 4R platform).