Its not unsolved. It's very solved. It was not an engineering question.

It seems that physics -> chemistry -> biology is a layering of abstractions and/or emergent phenomena, and any explanations of mechanics at these higher levels is more along the lines of "how was this built from these lego blocks" rather than being some more fundamental discovery.

You keep on making assertions - perhaps you could back it up with some explanation of why you regard this as a more fundamental discovery (or however you would like to characterize it)?