I think people need to realize that biology and tech are disciplines that might traverse on the same track, but in opposite directions.
Biology is going from top-down where we have an incredibly complicated system that we need to dissect and reduce down to workable fundamental parts. In tech/computer-science, we are going bottom-up where have man-made fundamental parts that we build up into incredibly complicated systems to perform a function.
We are kinda at the point where both disciplines are starting to intersect each other on the same track; hence the popularity of biotech right now.
The additional problem there is biology (and the underlying physics) is currently in a state where the known-unknowns continue to increase at an exponential rate. Exploration to reduce physical/biological systems into workable parts continue to reveal even further constituent sub-systems, which in turn opens up entire new fields of research and new unknowns to be explored (seemingly ad infinitum).
The authors of this piece note:
Yet despite our progress so far, genetic circuit design has often been characterized by a manual and failure-prone process. Engineers often spend years creating a functional design through trial-and-error.
This is still absolutely true.
Part of the challenge of the synbio field is to do better than this while still being on the sane side of the "andy grove fallacy", which is loosely stated as "hey biologists, transistors are easy now; what's the holdup?" . The holdup, of course, is that 4.5 billion years of monkeypatching makes for a really hard slog.