I agree. There is no secret magic cure to aging. There's never going to be a pill that makes you younger. The reason the human body ages is that it's a lot easier to build a new human from scratch than it is to repair damaged cells, damaged tissue, etc. Nature doesn't know how to do that effectively, at least not for complex life forms as large as human beings.

Ultimately, I think that if we want to extend life indefinitely, we'll need a strategy that involves replacing organs, replacing brain tissue, and maybe replacing most of the human body. You might be able to boost someone's life span by a few years with stem cells and such, but that's just patching the binary like you said. It's like repairing a home. You can patch drywall, but eventually, to fix a very old house, you might have to rip everything open and replace most of the materials. At some point it's easier to rebuild parts of the house than to keep patching.

IMO, we should be harnessing the fact that nature is very good at growing new healthy tissue. There has to be a way to coax stem cells into growing a new heart, a new liver, or a new arm. We ought to figure out how to do that. Then we could potentially grow you a new liver in a vat based on your own stem cells in a matter of months. We might even be able to automate surgeries such as liver replacement. That kind of technology seems like it should be feasible within 20-30 years with targeted research.

But much disease is acquired environmentally, and many repairs are due to normal wear and tear, building anew would be useless to serve both of those ends.

And unless you can figure out why cells age, you can't build new humans who are immune to senescence either.

Defeating the aging process is critical to solving both problems.

If you don't even have a compiler, it's easier to patch a binary that's already running than make one from scratch. That's a closer analogy to the situation under discussion.

But that does nothing to save the rich bastards funding it from dying.

Death sucks, but I’m not sure indefinite life extension is a great idea for humanity at large.