Indianapolis is the 16th largest US city by population. Nearly a million people live in the city proper, and 2.2 million living in the city and surrounding metro area. What do you mean it is tiny? More people live there than San Francisco, Seattle, Denver and Nashville.
And regardless most of the country is tiny, and none of it is irrelevant. Without those "tiny" "irrelevant" places the big port cities that make so much money shipping goods wouldn't have anywhere to ship them to. If the only people you care about are the ones living in cities the size of LA and up, I'm afraid you care about very few people.