Here's an example how hashed passwords are utterly useless: You have an application that needs access to a database. Access is password controlled. I give you the hashed password, and tell you to write a script to retrieve a piece of data from the database. Now, what's your plan? How do you intend to use this hashed password?

Hashed passwords are great if your purpose is to check whether a given password is valid. However, the point of hashing passwords is to make retrieving them impractical. Which means that if you need the plain text password, hashed passwords are not the answer.