Interesting, but also kind of propagandistic and it definitely doesn't take anywhere near that much time and money. In reality you need two generations of fruit

Interesting, but also kind of propagandistic and it definitely doesn't take anywhere near that much time and money. In reality you need two generations of fruit: a first generation where you plant 1,000+ trees with good ancestry, and then a second generation where you make sure your selections do well when grafted, stay true to form, and thrive under a variety of different conditions and microclimates. This really takes at most a few hundred thousand dollars and maybe 15 years, the only reason this specific variety cost so much to create is that they were trying to do the biggest rollout of all time for a huge commercial crop. And don't get me wrong, Cosmic Crisp is fine. But I don't think they're any better than Snap Dragon, which probably cost well under a million dollars to create. All in all, if you have a house with some land then you can basically do this in your back yard for almost no money if you're so inclined.