The reason for practicing depends on the person.

I practice because the way I meditate reduces suffering right away, starting with the first meditation session. It helps releive stress and helps me let go of unpleasant emotions. It makes me feel tranquil and it elevates my mood. When I practice I am happier and I worry less.

And why not practice?
If you do not know what to do you can just as well practice.

And stop wanting.
Now is the right time to do this.
Why? Because now, you fully SEE your wanting. When you see it, you can stop it. Or at least, you can stop identifying with it.

Just sit.
And then see what happens in each moment.
If the wanting comes back, just sit with it.
Let the wanting act itself out, while you sit. It will come, it will go. Your sitting will be the mirror in which you can see your wanting.

30 min each day, why not. Doesn´t hurt.

Dunno why YOU should practice but I practice as Im very much pissed off with all these arisings and passings within my conscious self. I've tried shrinks, excercise, hobby, drugs, alcohol, sex, to be in love, traveling, socialising, etc ... nothing would take away that suffering I've so deeply felt for very long. 
Once I've discovered that in a mindful moment there was only THIS-ness not refering to a Self I knew there was nothing else I could do but be mindful of that which IS and that was THIS ... moment to moment.

Will this practice lead to some fab state of mind?
Will I be reborn in some fab realm?
Will I be happy?
Will I be an enlightened master?

Dunno. What then do I know? Let me see, maybe "Touch the Earth" as Buddha say. 

As I mentioned above some teachers like Shinzen Young (and others) say you can become enlightened without a noticeable shift.

Anyone who says practicing doesn't improve your life is not speaking for all forms or practice (see my previous post).

They say it's better to dig one 100' well than ten 10' wells, but if you've been diligent with one method for that long and it's not delivering relief, please try a different method. I've put considerable time into two distinct methods, and one worked much better for me for whatever unknowable reasons: Ven. Vimalaramsi's "6R" method (as taught in the book The Path to Nibbana). I have extremely strong wholesome ecstatic experiences when I sit every day, and physically feel different when I go out for the day. Joy always seems extremely close. I practically just have to remind myself to look for it, and it starts flowing. I'm having new experiences every day.

Whatever you do, please keep practicing or at least experimenting, and don't worry about enlightenment. Supposedly it's somewhere way down a road, but for now we just need to keep moving in the right direction.

I don't have anything here. I really don't know anything, either. I will just offer that after meditating for quite a while...

My life is exactly the same as it was before I started practicing, but I view it dramatically different, which actually changes the life somewhat for those around me. I don't know about this phenomenological shift, exactly...but my mind processes a lot of suffering very differently than it used to. The suffering then isn't necessarily suffering in the same way. Calling it that is a bit of a misnomer. Unpleasant things still occur regularly, just as before. Pleasant and in the middle things happen most often. Viewing them differently makes for less suffering.  

I'm not sure one needs to go so far as to "see behind the curtain" entirely to get that much. I certainly don't see behind the curtain. 

Oh - and - as others have said. When I can feel any stress or anxiety building up, sitting in meditation even 15 minutes reduces the physical results pretty dramatically. 

So that's my contribution to "why sit?". 

That seems clear as a bell, and sounds like a way forward to me, despite the tragedy of the kingless monkeys. In the spirit of steering with the skid, I would even say you might want to do a few things that seemed clearly self-indulgent and off the table while enlightenment was in play. Ding-dong, the King is in a hot tub with a margarita, or whatever. Namaste, amigo.

HMK, the future of all that is holy rests with you now.

Now you’re getting somewhere!

In my opinion, what you want is what you think enlightenment would be like (the fulfillment of your hopes of 6-7 years on the path) not enlightenment itself (the end of who you think you are - as you seem to sense, there is no reason why you would want this). Sorry to be a bummer my friend.

Real enlightenment doesn’t sell, hence teachers and evangelists peddle fake versions. They are competing for your attention with contradictory claims.

I’m not an authority on anything so please don’t accept my claims at face value. Do your own research before investing. Follow the money!

Okay, thank you. It sort of frees me up, a little here, and seems closer to the substance of any piece of half-cooked psghetti (a typo so funny i'm leaving it in) that could possibly stick to your wall right now. 

We hear a lot more these days about "meditated-related difficulties"--- strong techniques setting off all sorts of gnarly psychological and even psychiatric side effects. But one meditation-related difficulty that I think is largely unnoticed is perfectly normal, psychologically stable people, having applied the three characteristics, or the work of the path that goes through dissolution and on into the dark night nanas, in whatever vocabulary, finding that they don't see what good it can possibly do, all things deeply considered, and experiencing despair. I mean, the Buddha set out for nirvana after seeing a sick man, an aging man, and a dead man, and then a monk, which seemed to him to point a way out. But the Buddha aged, sickened, and died. What is that nirvana, then, even in the terms he originally framed the dukha? The whole thing looks like a bait-and-switch. It's even worse with Jesus, pragmatic dharma speaking: pick up your cross and follow me, love love love all the way up the hill to die young and horribly. No obvious fruit in this lifetime there. And J's last words on the cross were "My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?" , which might at least make a person wonder whether Jesus might have felt like the whole thing was a bust himself, at the end.

I put these two marquee cases starkly and harshly simply to frame this issue: does "spiritual practice", with all the well known dissolutions, sacrifices, etc., the time spent Doing Spiritual Shit, the dark nights, do, uh, shit? In this lifetime. Jesus said "By their fruits, ye shall know them." Does his brief career as an arguably miraculously gifted healer constitute his fruits? Do we really have to defer "fruits" beyond the frame of this lifetime? I mean, if that stone at Jesus' tomb really got rolled away by angels after three days, if we could buy that, it would change the question. But who can buy that, really? And even if we buy it, Jesus got his ass to heaven anyway, pdq, and left the fucking world to deal with the bloody mess that we now call Christianity. (I speak as a Catholic, of sorts.)

And you see despair in yourself, and i am a friend to despair, and a brother to jackals, and a companion to owls (Job 30:29, I take Job as a prime case study in faithful despair). I don't have a dog in the enlightenment hunt, enlightenment is actually against my religion, as a sectarian Jew. But I know despair. You are basically together, but I have known suicidal despair as well. And it is in light of that that i do feel like i can say something to you about your main question in this thread: why practice meditation or prayer? For me, it is because i have found, by going around and around, spiraling up and down through despair at its worst, that meditation alone--- it think it is precisely at the deepest point of the dark night, at absolute pure laser beam desire for deliverance from the hopeless agony that is despair that i have found, not good, but something quite beyond good that is simply . . . relief. It's like dying, but even cheaper, with no messy clean-up left behind for our loved one's. A lot of the time is probably doesn't even amount to what we might call EQ. John of the Cross says:

In this nakedness the spirit finds
its quietude and rest.
For in desiring nothing,
nothing raises it up
and nothing weighs it down,
because it is in the heart of its humility.
When it desires something
in this very desire it is wearied.

You're not going to make much money selling that, or thrill the crowds of spiritual seekers. For me, the benefit is obvious: i don't kill myself, and i get through another day. You're dealing with your own degree of despair, but I believe the parallel holds: the experience of that nakedness of no desire, that paradoxical embrace of the truth despairing of anything desirable, in heaven (for you) and on earth (in extreme cases like me), can, in fact and in practice, be reliably experienced here on this earth, and it does not take anything more than what've you've had for years, a decent meditation practice and letting for of desire for anything else, out of despair, EQ, stream entry, enlightenment, whatever, gate, gate, gone the fuck gate. It happens like the lifting of a weight, and the weightless heart of humility is impervious to despair, though despair will come again in life, and around we go, and then we die. So that's why i practice, and why i'm flinging this strand of spaghetti again your wall.