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It’s just difficult to research these edits in depth because historically there hasnt really been a legal route to research these edits afaik

There is actually a tremendous amount of ongoing research into germline gene editting! GMO agricultural crops are the most obvious (and quite controversial, in large part because of corporations like Monsanto).

But you probably have heard the recent stories about the so-called "Dire Wolf". Hank Green has an excellent video explaining that. But that is germline gene editting!

You should also look into actual de-extinction projects, like with the American Chestnut Tree.

The point is, we are doing germline gene editting research! But the human genome - and in fact almost all genomes - are ridiculously complex, and edits can have wildly unintended consequences that can persist for generations.

We can rip DNA apart and read every last molecule of nucleic acid. We can sequence it down to a complete and exact dataset of your entire existence. But we can't completely map it structurally - epigenetics is the study of how the same DNA sequence can be twisted and knotted to behave differently at different times.

Even if we could map the whole shape of the epigenome - which is a remarkable challenge - we are quite far from actually decrypting that data and understanding it completely! It still wouldn't tell us the complete story, because epigenetic changes can occur throughout an organism's entire lifespan, some of them scheduled as part of development, some of them in response to environmental conditions like stress or starvation!

Most of our understanding of what DNA actually does comes from loss-of-function experiments, where we just destroy pieces of it and see what happens. There are also gain-of-function experiments, where we just add new pieces and see what happens. But the point is, until we actually do the experiment, we really don't know for sure what's going to happen.

There's a lot of obvious reasons why that isn't performed in humans, and arguably shouldn't be for quite some time. The risks currently far outweigh the rewards, because we don't yet have enough understanding to even quantify the risks or the rewards.

We can test on animal analogues like rats and chimpanzees, but we still have a lot of biological infrastructure that is entirely unique to humans. Our bipedal structure and oversized prefrontal cortexes make things quite complicated.

Advancements in epigenetic analysis, protein folding, and mRNA function will bring us dramatically closer, though! All promising avenues in which we are making leaps and bounds every decade. Or we were, but the US has unfortunately started dismantling its health sciences research and become actively hostile to universities.