I think that analogy is very apt- the fact that we have such a hard time understanding and predicting the outcomes of bioengineering/synthetic biology suggests that we are still missing huge parts of the picture of how life works.
It seems very likely to me that our views are too reductionist, and the much of the key information isn't even encoded at the level of DNA as previously assumed.
The cells multicellular organisms are constructed from are all shockingly similar... "cells" are basically a solved problem for this type of life, and somewhat frozen in their functionality because major changes would disrupt the larger systems that they make up.
What I said was a matter of opinion, I didn't quantify it in any way, so I'm not sure how you can say that, but I will elaborate more so you have something to really disagree with :-)
Sure, of course the different multicellular eukaryotes vary, but the diversity is very low compared to what we see across all life, look at Figure 1 here for example [1].
I am looking at it from the perspective of the structure of the metabolic network, as this is my area of research. There is a huge amount of diversity in the fundamental structures of metabolic networks, types of metabolites and enzymes produced, etc. across all life, but from that perspective the differences between one multicellular eukaryote and another are slight in comparison. Multicellular eukaryotes have evolved very different behaviors, shapes, sizes, etc. from a relatively conserved biochemistry. When taken out of the context of an organism in cell culture, the cells are similar enough that their behavior under diverse experimental conditions can be predicted by nearly identical metabolic models, whereas you would see nothing of the sort with distantly related bacteria- the metabolism can be massively rearranged.
You made a broad, almost dismissive generalization from, as it turns out now, a purely macroscopic view. It's like a physicist studying galaxy filaments saying "all galaxies are shockingly similar", because the filaments show more complex structures than individual galaxies.
It seems very likely to me that our views are too reductionist, and the much of the key information isn't even encoded at the level of DNA as previously assumed.
The cells multicellular organisms are constructed from are all shockingly similar... "cells" are basically a solved problem for this type of life, and somewhat frozen in their functionality because major changes would disrupt the larger systems that they make up.