The effort to sequence the genomes of 1.67 million organisms

https://www.science.org/content/article/once-thought-fantasy-effort-sequence-dna-millions-species-gains-momentum
Six years ago we hadn't yet developed some of the long read technology that have made assemblying nearly complete genomes, but even the long read technology that had existed at that time has improved.  When this was first proposed we were could not develop complete genome sequences there were a lot of bits of the genomes that were resistant to the short read sequencing tech, and the long read tech was more expensive.  They have not gotten the funding to do the sequencing.  Hopefully technology will progress, and the infrastructure needed to accomplish such a task can be assembled.  The bottle neck is not really the sequencing.  You can sequence over 90 percent of a genome in a couple days, assembling the genome may take as much computer time, but annotating the genome and the genome comparisons that need to be done take a lot of time.  The UK group thought that they could ramp up to producing a couple finished genomes per day in order to sequence all the species of the British Isles, but I don't think that they have met that goal.
1.67 million genomes is a crazy number when you were not talking about complete genomes, and that for posterity the effort would have had to have been undertaken again when technology allowed the sequencing of complete genomes.  We still do not have a complete chicken genome, but they think that we are getting close.  A lot of the sequence that is being added seems to be repetitive, but we have to develop some means to try to identify interesting bits that may be burried in that long stretch of repetitive sequence.  We still haven't identified where all the known transcripts come from, so there are genes still missing from the build.  Multiply the issues by a million.
My take is that they need to select species that they think that we could benefit from knowing most of their genome sequence.  Develop the tech to generate complete genomes, and automate the process before diving in and completing over a million incomplete genomes that will just have to be redone.
Ron Okimoto