Exploring unknown paths that turn out not to lead anywhere useful is still worthwhile, since we can't possibly know beforehand what unknown information will or won't be useful. We don't even know what research might become useful based on new information from some other field or line of research.
Great, so there’s no way to “fail” and they can keep asking for money indefinitely. See the problem here? You’d stop shoveling money into research that hadn’t yielded any results either, especially if it was $24 million dollars that could have gone to better avenues.
That was stated as the main goal of the project: improve quality of life in dogs and hope the results transfer to humans. It didn’t achieve that goal so far. I really don’t know what you want me to say.
