Not only that, it's only really been in the last 3 or 4 years that the sequencing technology has exploded in terms of data volume, as well as modern computer hardware that can analyze that data in any reasonable time frame. That's whats enabled whole genome sequencing of disease patients to become something practical.
When the human genome was published the state of the art sequencing machines produced a remarkably tiny fraction of what we can get now, and the state of art computer on which to crunch the data was a Pentium 3. Just because a human reference genome was published didn't change the fundamentals of how future research would still be conducted.