Exactly. Furthermore, you don't need to build life from scratch. That's wasteful. You'll just set yourself back years, possibly a decade or more, trying and err

Exactly. Furthermore, you don't need to build life from scratch. That's wasteful. You'll just set yourself back years, possibly a decade or more, trying and erring until you get to roughly the same place as the stripped-down bacterial genome at which Venter and his colleagues have arrived. Venter isn't explicitly trying to create life from scratch; he's trying to find the minimum viable platform from which to harness life for various useful purposes. Starting from the proverbial "pile of unrefined rock" would accomplish nothing but scoring a few vanity points.