Your personal experience with bioengineering should inform you as to how quickly a highly funded effort might undertake to engineer such a virus. While the Wuhan BSL-4 lab has spent some time developing proficiency with Bat Coronavirus, only last year were certain pathogens illegally provided to that lab by spies from Canada.

"Perhaps, most interesting to me is why the latency factor? Why, or to what end were they engineering it in the first place?"

Dr. Cottrell speculates that researchers were seeking to develop a vaccine, and sought to increase the latency in hosts to facilitate that development process. Having more time for their early attempts to have an effect would improve their ability to measure small improvements, I believe.

However, it's also true that such latency increases the potential virulence of a bioweapon.

Estimates of the R0 (how many new infections each host spreads the virus to) of the nCoV range between 4 - 10, all of which are horribly catastrophic, and are generally due to the latency, since shedding occurs during latency, which means it's infectious while hosts show no symptoms.

Dr. Cottrell discusses the difference between splicing things in and taking advantage of the mutations that happen naturally. He finds it likely that the non-contiguous insertions that preserve the polarity of the expressed proteins improving their affinity to host cells were the result of the latter, rather than the former, due to the extreme complexity of protein folding and the subtle affects on cellular uptake.

The first evidence I noted that the nCoV pathogen was bioengineered was that it was based on bat coronavirus, which was a competency of the Wuhan BSL-4 lab. The extant understanding of the nCoV pathogen excludes it being a zoonotic virus. It likely has never infected a bat in the wild.

However, every bit of understanding we have of it's exact nature better enables us to devise vaccines, and treat it in people. Knowing it's etymology will better enable us to prevent such pathogens from causing human suffering in the future. This is particularly true because this virus is almost certainly a lab created pathogen. The political mechanisms that allowed this pathogen to be created and released are something wholly under the control of human beings, whether that release was accidental or not, and should we fail to rationally prevent this from ever happening again, we will be basically committing suicide as a species.

Thanks!