FWIW, in a past life, I bought (4) 2L Sartorius reactors used for $75k, built out my lab for <$50k and had an operating budget of $450k w/ 2 fully-burdened RAs.

I agree with much else of what you've said. I worked in biosynthetics with some of the Lygos teammates at another company. All-in-all it's not a bad idea, but the development time is _so_ long, especially in yeasts. It's analgous to writing assembly w/o documentation, and debugging takes months per code-change.