As someone involved in the field, I agree on the need for a better theory, but disagree with your claim that "there's no getting away from the wet lab". The traditional wet lab absolutely has to be gotten away from, because there are huge issues with transferring knowledge gained on organism X onto organism Y.

Reason? Lack of theory. We don't understand enough about what causes something to work in one case, but not another.

There's just no getting away from theory, in the end.