Of all the fields that I've worked in, genomics has been one of the most overhyped (virtual drug discovery is the other) and it takes a ton of training just to understand how messed up the field is.
The section "Background to the Human Genome Project" gives some color on why they did what they did (TL;DR there was an ostensibly competitive race between the public project and a private one).
I ended up providing some useful resources for helping uncover just how bad genomic assemblies were (at the comptuational level): most genomic assemblies using whole genome shotgun sequencing used a number of heuristics which were believed to be correct, but I suspected that the heuristics failed to deal with repetitive regions and short sequences well. So I built a computing system with >1M xeon cores (Google Exacycle) and we provided the system to Gene Myers (who did the original WGS assembly for Celera). he used the system to do an all-vs-all comparison of sequence pairs, which found numerous bugs and problems with the heuristics that were being used. It was a huge amount of compute but the result was that myers was able to use PacBio data to assembly a significantly better genome, faster, on a laptop: (https://www.yuzuki.org/favorite-talk-agbt-2014-gene-myers-ma...)
