Creating 'The Matrix' makes no sense

Why would the machines create a simulation for their batteries?

I mean, people can sleep. People can be sedated. With selective breeding, perhaps people could be kept asleep 'indefinitely' without any drugs or whatnot. Using someone as battery is bound to drain them of energy, so they would be tired all the time, so they could sleep quite a lot.

Now, combining this with some kind of perfectly-timed sedative, I don't see why the machines would go the painstaking effort to design, model, texture, light, program and maintain a ridiculously complicated simulation that's bound to take quite a lot of CPU and GPU power, memory and other resources (not to mention hard drive space), all of which require a lot of energy to keep going.

I mean, whatever you gain from the batteries, you lose maintaining this enormous simulation that requires so much (even modern supercomputers can't render a whole Earth with all its cities with that kind of realism and consistent minuscule ping and super high fps), or at least you lose so much, it might not be worth doing.

In any case, even using humans as batteries makes no sense, as so many people have pointed out ever since 1999, but there are just so, so many other reasons why this whole thing makes no sense, it boggles the mind.