As a moth aficionado, I'd say they're much more interesting. They evolved 90 million years before butterflies. There are also 9 times as many moth species as butterfly species. They're also more efficient at pollination than not only butterflies but bees. Go moths!
In French they are all butterflies (papillons). There once was a distinction between butterflies and night butterflies (moths) but apparently it's now obsolete and they are just all lepidoptera.
That seems crazy. All butterflies come from moths, so it'd make more sense for Papillon to mean moth. It's like calling everything from the order Rodentia a Capybara, or everything in Eulipotyphla a hedgehog, both things within those orders in smaller numbers.