As far as I understand it, it's taboo because the results will be misused, and any results that do exist will not necessarily apply to the genetics 100 years from now but the consequences of their misuse would. And unless we're going to go full Gattaca, then I'm not sure what good the results would be.
Generally speaking you're spot on and I think the 'report' is unrealistic. The one wild card I could see accelerating EV in the heartland is wind power.
If you look at wind speed maps of America (http://apps2.eere.energy.gov/wind/windexchange/wind_maps.asp ) there is huge generating capacity going right through the Dakota's. With the decline in manufacturing jobs, politicians there may soon see investing in wind energy jobs as the future.
That doesn't solve the problem of making an electric truck that meets the needs of rural America, but it does put a lot of cheap energy in their backyard waiting to charge giant truck batteries.
Chinese people want the Apple brand they don't care about iOS. If iOS was the status symbol it would get pirated and installed elsewhere. Apple has a strong brand because of it's history as a premium device company internationally, that's all. Their brand was their first mover advantage in China but now Chinese companies are closing that brand gap and since WeChat rules the software side Apple is going to have a hard time being a big player until it can differentiate itself on something other than brand.
Just like in sports, you get paid more for what you have done vs what you could do.
Having a few really good pieces of work to show off is no guarantee that you'll consistently pump out good work, or that you haven't left clients high and dry before. Since a third party has no real way of gauging that except by your track record, they're taking more of a chance on someone with less of a track record. More risk means they need more reward, which means you get paid less.
Most of us COULD run a Fortune 500 company as well as the average CEO but we won't get the chance, nor compensation, until we have the experience.
If price is your thing, Linode for compute and Backblaze for storage; 4 CPU and 8GB RAM for $40 a month and 1/2 cent per month per gig. For full feature cloud I find Azure a better competitor to AWS as far as features/price/interface and per minute billing.