Yes, it's important to the restaurant to know if your meal is okay while there's still a chance to do something about it. It's also a chance to ask for anything else without a restaurant of people flagging down the wait staff.

My father believed that truly great restaurants don't do this, because they KNOW their food is perfect.

Practically speaking, though, dpeck is right... shortly after the food is dropped, the waiter should confirm the meal is to the customer's expectations. This is also the chance for customers to ask for condiments, get a replacement fork for the one they dropped, etc. Nothing worse than sitting in front of a hot meal you can't eat and being unable to get the waiter's attention.

It has to do with the timing of it, like gp mentioned. Current best practice is that that waiter should come by within a couple minutes of the food arriving to top off water and make sure your first bites were as expected so that any problems can be fixed early in the meal.

This is much preferred to a manager only hearing about a problem after all the food has been eaten or the customer has sat staring at a plate with unsatisfactory food on it while their companions eat (making everyone less comfortable as generally humans don’t like to eat when others haven’t had the opportunity to).

It generally seems odd to me, but at my job we used to go at lunch time to a place which didn't do this, and they would simply lose one person's order some of the time (i'd say 1 in 10). It's really annoying to be the one person whose food hasn't arrived yet wondering for ages if they are being slow or have forgotten. This extra touch gives them the opportunity to find out that they forgot something without completely pissing off the customer.

Hate is a bit strong; it annoys me too, probably more than is reasonable.

I assumed it was to cut costs for people who complain at the end to try and get free food.

This is restaurants hiring someone to check on their own staff, isn't it?