MC2002 was not primarily a wargame to develop operational plans. You can do that much easier and cheaper with a bunch of generals around a map. MC2002 was a training exercise with an element of competitiveness to pressure people under unexpected situations. As a training exercise its prime goal was not to figure out what plans were best but to just exercise plans and get people to do the plan, period. Given that, events that stopped the training exercise, like missileing all the ships, were retcon'd in order to do what the exercise was supposed to do, train people
Wargames have repeatedly been used to align strategic initiatives because they are designed to as closely replicate an adversary's actions and resources as closely as possible. So for instance in better times there was Proud Prophet [1], another wargame, played out in 1983. Its goal was to simulate outcomes of various scenarios involving hot conflict with the USSR. Up to the point of that wargame, the US position towards the USSR had been this sort of 'peace through strength', 'escalate to deescalate' nonsense.
The problem is that the wargame demonstrated that it ended up with the extinction of the Northern Hemisphere every single time. We didn't then change the rules of the game to make it so we could still play nuclear games and come out okay, but instead took this as a major wakeup call. It directly led to a shift in US policy towards the USSR of coexistence, de-escalation, and some degree of reconciliation. Within 7 years the first McDonalds would open in the USSR, and the entire Soviet system would collapse in under a decade after the shift of the strategy driven entirely by this wargame result.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proud_Prophet
Yes, wargames can be used to evaluate strategic and operational plans. However, notice how many boots on the ground were involved in Proud Prophet. My point was that MC2002 was not primarily a wargame for evaluating plans, it was primarily a training exercise where lessons learned from executing the existing plans might be used to wargame out future changes