Selective breeding isn't genetic engineering though. GMO is used when genes from a species are inserted into another, not for strains that are produced through artificial selection of organisms with desirable traits.
Yes, selective breeding is far less controlled and predictable as to unintended changes; people think of it as safer because of the way it used to be done which operates over longer time scales, which, aside from not actually providing any kind of safety, neglects the fact that modern methods allow selective breeding to operate over much shorter time scales.
That said, I don't really have an opinion on GMOs. I'm fine with you partaking first, though. :-)
Yes, selective breeding (both artificial and natural selection) create fundamentally new organisms.
"Not necessarily" but sometimes.
So do many non-GMO engineered crops where the trait that is the focus of optimization isn't yield, since a “yield problem” is deteemined by comparison to mainstream crops which are engineered for yield traits.
> That's partly because this kind of genetic modification isn't actually all that controlled
That's even more true of selective breeding, whether by traditional or more rapid modern means, so that's not a problem with GMOs compared to any real alternative, it's a problem of all existing methods compared to a hypothetical state where we have both perfect modelling to predict phenotypical effects of genetic changes and perfect ability to make arbitrary, error-free edits to genetic code. And even then we are stuck with the fact that some traits at inherently in conflict.