The paper is credible. The folks arguing over easier methods…

If you cut lots of corners you can build a car with no accessories. If you’re a building a car to make it easy to service and manufacture, you don’t always take the quickest and easiest route.

The SARs-CoV-2 genome shows signs of construction with foresight towards future modification and experimentation.

They built it with modularity so surgery could be very fast and cheap in the future.