True, but there are a host of techniques to skip local maximums, for example running several totally separate populations (families) for a certain number of gen

True, but there are a host of techniques to skip local maximums, for example running several totally separate populations (families) for a certain number of generations and then creating a new population (family) based only on combinations from two other families. And a lot of times even the first local maximums are impressive. To see how powerful these things can be just compare using brute force random solutions to genetic algorithms you get results that are better by quite a few orders of magnitude. Or in short don't knock it till you've tried it. It isn't a universal solution for every problem and it can take quite a lot of work to correctly tweak with the fitness score and with all the variables but it is a very useful tool and can produce some very cool results.