[maxander]

It's worth noting that those clinical applications were developed when technology didn't allow long reads, so "clinical applications don't need long reads" is at present a truism. There may be potential applications that require long reads that simply couldn't have been invented yet (albeit I haven't the slightest what those would be.)

[comstock]

Yes, but I would say quality is most important in almost all cases. Well, quality being defined as <1% error rate, which isn’t such a high bar.

The most compelling near term applications (NITP etc) use fragmented DNA, and long reads will have no benefit here.

So, yes. Long reads are useful, but you need to have at least reasonable performance in other respects. The same thing has been seen with PacBio, who have not played well in the market, despite having a read length advantage.