The central question I'm trying to address is whether design of living organisms is even possible, barring cut and try. Is it possible, in principal, to predict the effect of a novel mutation? And assuming you could predict the structural effect, could you also predict the effect on fertility and viability in a constantly fluctuating environment?
It's one thing to say that goddidit, quite another to argue for a designer that is not omnipotent.
Besides SETI, one of the other distributed computing efforts going on right now is research into protein folding for cancer research - I've been debating whether to drop SETI and donate some cycles to that recently. But the fact that it requires massively parallel distributed computing systems to figure out the potential configurations of comparatively simple proteins - that is, hundreds of thousands or even millions of machine-years - should give us some idea of the absolutely enormous computing power that would be needed to determine all the possible configurations and products of, and effects of modifications to, a given strand of DNA. And then if you understand how natural genomes work, maybe then you can start to think about designing your own genome from scratch.
If it is possible - and I'm guessing that it is, although it's just a guess - it's a long way away. Maybe if I can manage to finally quit smoking, I'll be able to hang around just long enough to see something like that happen, but something makes me doubt it. Who knows, though? Someone we've never heard of could be in a lab somewhere right now, on the verge of the massive breakthrough that gives us the key to it all ;)