If the objective facts are neutral, why should knowledge of those facts be good or lovable?

Knowledge is a useful by-product of the love of knowledge. Having the knowledge isn't virtuous, but seeking it is, because seeking knowledge is the best way to obtain it (not counting sad experience), and having knowledge enables moral decisions. Thus, to be moral, one must seek knowledge, which makes seeking knowledge a moral imperative and the desire for knowledge a virtue.

How all this affects the last man standing is no more important than how it affects three-headed hominids. That's not the world we live in. We live in a social world, in which the desire to know the facts is essential to escaping Hobbes's jungle.

Aesthetics seems to me to have no place in this, except as a metaphor. Beauty is truth, truth beauty. (Even the poem is beautiful because it's true; otherwise, it might be merely pretty.) So I question whether there can be aesthetics without appreciators. A tree falling in a forest makes a sound, but it is not an aesthetically loaded sound in the absence of beings with an aesthetic sense. The moon would still be round, but the roundness would not be beautiful; it would just be there.

The natural world is not the result of a "creative process," except, like a metaphor, viewed ex post. "And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good." (A bit of antediluvian premature football spiking there.) The universe is neither a triumph nor a perversion. It's just there. What we do with it, thanks to our morally laudable search for knowledge about it, is worthy of evaluation.