They did further testing in the movie too! Note the treadmill tests that the protagonist was cheating on too.
But in terms of a general, big-org failure to properly use heuristics? Probably the most realistic part of the movie!
>A movie is nothing but what it depicts.
And some things have to be understood metaphorically because it would be too cumbersome to have to present the full picture and bring the viewer up to speed. That's just how the medium works.
For the story, it suffices that there exist people who do more tedious jobs because smarter people get the better ones. To show a more realistic scenario (janitor checking rooms on a tv screen and pushing buttons rather than mopping), for every dimension that changes, would take away precious minutes from the runtime for little narrative benefit.
> Maybe that's short of maximizing the potential of the tech, but it seems like a genuine consequence.
It's not, because you get literally the same consequence by not genetically testing sperm/eggs at all and simply screening by motility and donor health etc - people who don't do that have kids with more defects. And 'short of maximizing the potential' is exactly my point. A world with perfect genetic prediction and too-cheap-to-meter sequencing simply will not look like that. Some healthier kids are the least of the consequences of generations of society-wide embryo selection with perfect prediction and universal sequencing.
> Because they'd have automated it all?
Yes. Assuming it's still even an issue.
> but that's just to save the viewer from having to be told "oh, 'janitors' now just press buttons and visually inspect the work of machines".
A movie is nothing but what it depicts.