I've seen people criticize this so many times but I never see anyone take into account the full details. Namely:
The plan was never to freeze EVERYONE. It was partly to REDUCE the population to buy more time and breathing room while others more qualified to work on repair efforts could be doing that, and partly to ship a significant portion of the population off to Tau Ceti to try to establish a new human world as well.
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A trained team of four taking five hours to fully prepare a patient was what they'd been able to achieve so far, with an extremely small team and an extremely secretive project. The odds that it would never have gotten better with more research are effectively zero. This was very new science still being figured out.
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The investors absolutely knew it could have done a lot of good, because they'd wanted to push it through when the success rate was at 70% for the average person and maternity was a nightmare. M— was the loudest advocate for taking more time but everyone stood right there with her. They'd gotten it up to a 92% chance of success without significant lasting damage for the average person by the time the plug was pulled.
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The fact that there was a kill fee on the project indicates they were working on commission and probably woefully underpaid, too, but like, that's just salt in the wound next to everything else.
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The funding wasn't pulled because the science wasn't working or even just because it was taking too long. The project had been top secret, and there was a leak with information about it that freaked out the population. It made it "real" to the general public, who had previously been kept in the dark about the state of things, that the planet really was in such bad shape that world governments were figuring out evacuation plans. "Everyone had a fucking opinion."
Given John's wording that others could have bailed and gone to other projects but "I was irradiated" and the way he was turned into a scapegoat for the whole project, the way people questioned the ethics and the amount of controversy around it, and the issues they were going to have disposing of the bodies (and John's sarcastic "you would've loved that" to Alecto) and how fast the non-magic-touched ones "melted", the most likely implication imo is that they were working with radiation, probably because the frozen people being shipped off would need to survive the radiation of space. And I reiterate: 92% chance of success without significant lasting damage. But unfortunately, this is our world in about 10-15 years, and if people freak the fuck out over GMOs because that science Sounds Scary, I think we can all more than imagine how people would react to a secret government funded group of scientists being discovered with a bunch of irradiated corpses, even if those bodies were ethically donated and that had been a necessary step to ensure it would be perfectly safe by the time it was used on living people.
The investors didn't pull funding because it wasn't viable. They pulled funding because it became Too Controversial, and they worried association would hurt their images and their wallets. And it doesn't tell us whether that intern cracked the FTL issue by finding a theoretical way to pull ships back out when they got stuck "doing quantum wheelies" in time before or after the cryo project was shut down, but given how quickly everything shifted, I'd suspect it wasn't long before. They saw a different option that they could focus more on themselves, and they took it.
The cryo project was never intended to be the one-step solution. It actively relied on not freezing everyone, there had to be people still around for clean-up, but ANY amount of breathing room would have been SOMETHING. If they'd frozen 5% of people to ship off to Tau Ceti and never did anything else, that would've been SOMETHING, let alone if they'd managed 20%, 50%, etc. Any reduction in pollution and energy consumption. Any chance for humanity to establish a proper home somewhere else as a backup. Any time at all bought, even months, weeks, would have been some additional chance for other people to figure out more ways to help stabilize things, too.
It just didn't matter how versatile the plan was, or that John could cure cancer on a whim (without even taking payment, while living in a building without power), or that he was trying so hard to Play By The Rules that he still hadn't even broken his NDAs by the time of the cow wall incident. Any one project or any one guy, no matter how powerful, was never going to be enough. The problems were too big, too systemic, and it takes collective action to fix collective problems. Any given person or group can only contribute so much.
This wasn't John thinking he had the holy grail and other people recognizing it as garbage. This was John trying to do his part and begging others to do theirs too, and everyone being too busy buying into propaganda or guarding their own ass first to step up and help.
So many want to imagine John as this self-absorbed Villain who always sucked, but I need everyone to remember, Alecto chose him. They looked for anyone with similar powers and there was no one. Alecto chose him for a reason. This was a good guy filled with deep love, good ideas, and good intentions. And good intentions don't always pave the road to hell, but, well... There's a reason we have a saying about it. It wasn't that the idea never had merit. It was that good ideas and good intentions alone are never enough.
Part of the horror is that anyone, even the kindest and most well-meaning of people, could become John in the wrong situation. He's multiple layers of cautionary tale. That's the point.
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