In my opinion, creating materials from prior material configuration is “cheating nature”, while creating materials ab initio will challenge our limitations and reliance on prior existing processes.
Materials from their atomic composition, bonding, lattice structures, and crystaline structures, and their alloys, give us an wide range of possibilities, of what can be done.
I think such exercise would have been completely intractable, prior to our expanded understanding of quantum mechanics and availability of super computing. This is why I think that Ab Initio methods should become to an extent the state of the art in material development, to tackle our challenges from Designing Better Batteries, Solar Panels, to Affordable Housing.