That's a bit of a mischaracterization of the work. The goal was to have a drop in replacement for a crop the population already grew, as well as to examine the technical side of the problem and see: Hey? These crazy mutant plants? If it's possible, what do we actually need to do to fix their nutritional deficits?

It's one face of the many sided die of crop trade-offs: What grows in harsh climates? What takes care of the soil? What combination is nutritionally optimal? What gives the biggest yield? What needs the fewest chemicals? The least oversight?

When I was still trying to figure out what problems I wanted to do research on, I asked a division director of LBNL a question: "Why would I ever bother with biofuels or plant engineering when they are abound with cases of research miss-sold and debatably worse than the status quo?"

His response was: Yes, much of the tech today has fallen short of its proposed benefits. Yes, the research community failed to engage the public, and now GMOs are a PR nightmare. Yes, the corn lobby inappropriately pushed ethanol to the forefront.

But the technology in the biosciences pipeline has taken this criticism into account and tried to work with it. On a basic sciences level, genomics researchers are now looking into the heterogeneity of crop genes to find the bits that give polyculture its kick. Biofuels researchers are producing non-ethanol mixtures that don't corrode engines. And plant engineers are making progress re-engineering nitrogen fixation, drought resistance, and yes, better pest resistance, too.

Some of the problems are purely technical. Some are cultural. Golden rice?

Initially, it had poor nutrient yield, but now the barrier to its adoption is its color; people in east-asian countries associated it with the grain they feed their livestock.

Long term. Maybe it will succeed. Maybe it will flop. But the ulterior motive of these projects is to progress the molecular picture of these organisms and transform random mutagenesis / cross breeding into solving a biological problem from first principles, the same way every other engineering does it.

One last snipe:

Meanwhile, farmers have bred 'stable crop varieties' for tens of thousands of years by selecting characteristics appropriate to the local microclimate... something that is explicitly forbidden with GMO crops.

This is an unfortunate side-effect of where the GMO conversation has gone. "Interspecies Mutant Monsters" is a far cry from "we put in two more cogs into the thousand-gene metabolic machine". Sadly, the recent generation of environmentalists have decided to label all transgenic plants as the bane of agriculture and the last solution to any problem.