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imho, the genome and genetic engineering is one of the biggest letdowns of the past century. The idea or promise of harnessing thee genome to improve or optimize life has not materialized except for select/limited instances. Cancer treatments have not improved much, only detection. Yes, there has been progress in immunotherapies on certain type of cancers, but not on the more common sarcomas.
The hope of modifying humans is still in the realm of sci fi, and see little reason for this to change. After a century, the state-of-the-art treatment for obesity is an injectable that effectively turns people into anorexics, not something that rewires the brain or other aspects of metabolism to make people thinner
We just sequenced the genome for the first time around the year 2000. We haven't actually been at this that long.
IMO, it should be given another 30 years before categorizing it with commercial nuclear fusion in terms of 'indefinite' difficulty.
the main problem is the things we want to treat or modify , like weight, are highly polygenic or only partially explained by genes
I think what's currently being done is that first someone does a GWAS study to figure out the markers for whatever we want to control, like height. Then in vitro fertilization techniques are used to make dozens of fertilized eggs, they're all sequenced, and you look at the markers given by the GWAS study on each and pick the one you prefer. That's not do-everything genetic engineering yet, you're still rolling the same old dice, but now you can roll them on the lab bench, look at some of the numbers early on and pick the one you like best.
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