I mean that sounds like they tried it with promising results but made avoidable mistakes.

If we really wanted to do it, with almost 80 million "top 1%" people in whatever category you want to optimise it's hard to say that the genepool isn't big enough, and also hard to argue against the fact that eugenics would work, but given the people who start it will be dead by the time any results are shown is it really worth ruining that many lives for is the real question - why not use genetic engineering on embryos and cell cultures if you want to improve human bodies (still not saying we should), as it's faster and less disruptive to existing people