Yeah, it feels like we need a phase transition in the speed and practicality of the process. But I don't believe we need a single concrete lab tech.
Years ago when I did research, my impression was that there was complexity galore. A researcher on Drosophila developmental signaling would have a very disjoint knowledge domain than that of a researcher in horizontal gene transfer and antibiotic resistance. Both would exist in a different planet altogether than a clinician prescribing a cancer treatment. And the three of them would generally lack the tooling that somebody doing systems biology was used to.
So, to me, the key thing we need is some sort of "domain cement", or a good way to pull operative knowledge and usable skills from everywhere.