Seems pretty odd to me that top-like spinning things have been captivating humans for going on 5,500 years.
I think a lot of the fascination has to do with the emergence of complexity from apparent simplicity. This goes far beyond the top's ability to stand against gravity, which we've all learned not to bet against in daily life. Gyroscopic stability, precession, and self-righting are easy to observe and play with in tops but counterintuitive and unexpected nonetheless.
Gaining some control over such a quirky thing is icing on the cake.
But no shame in being bamboozled by tops: Physics grad students typically find rotational motion harder to grasp than quantum mechanics or relativity. And Richard Feynman -- a physicist commonly ranked with Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein -- noted in his famous textbook that some physical phenomena are much easier to "understand" mathematically than they are to truly grasp at a gut level. The occasion was the chapter on rotational motion, and the math there wasn't exactly easy.