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The reason why is it is easier to train a biologist to become a programmer than it is to train a programmer to become a biologist. Sure the quality of biologist-turned-programmer code will often not be great, but it will usually answer the question asked.

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Not in my experience. The reason is because of funding. NIH grants are focused on biological discoveries and not so much around infrastructure. So you can get funding to build a tool, but not so much to maintain it. The downstream effect is that tools and websites are stuck in the era in which they were created, databases are not updated, and tools are broken because the grad student left and now there’s no one to respond to issues.

This is a seperate (important) issue.

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