alt Hacker News> It was a fairly big controversy at the time, because it wasn't clear you could do shotgun assembly of a genome the size of the human
The main controversy was indirect, e. g. several actors - including Craig - trying to patent ESTs. That scaffolding was possible was already shown before, e. g. Haemophilus influenzae in 1995: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7542800/
Shotgun assembly was not as controversial, just a more efficient divide-and-conquer approach that was mostly new-ish at the time.
> It all seems a little quaint now, given how little immediately actionable information came out of the genome effort
Well - you have the sequence, but the sequence alone does not necessarily tell everything. You just have more information than before.
> The main controversy was indirect, e. g. several actors - including Craig - trying to patent ESTs.
You're under-selling it. Celera filed thousands of patents on expressed sequence tags, long before anyone knew anything about them. It was a land grab.
Also, it only seems obvious if you're looking back at it with 20+ years of hindsight, but it was quite unclear at the time if it was possible to obtain a full read of the genome from shotgun sequencing alone. The human genome is 3000x larger than H. influenzae, and significantly more complex.