But the one thing keeping GMO technology back, and keeping it from being a regular industry, is people's irrational and extreme fear of them.

I don't think there's anything irrational in wanting to be informed if food you're buying is a GMO. The whole push is for (and the resistance is against) labeling them, not banning them.

apple you pluck from your garden isn't magically good and healthy for you, and an apple grown in a lab isn't magically bad and unhealthy for you

It's not about magic. Our pre-human ancestors co-evolved over many millions of years with their sources of food. In a very short period of time since then, in evolutionary terms, we have developed domestication, agriculture, industrialization, preservation, etc.

We're really just shooting blindly in the dark when it comes to our diets and what is healthy. Some people think it is safer to bet on primitive, natural foods than we're (arguably) optimized for by evolution. How our diet relates to our health is so complex and hard to study that I don't think you can prove or disprove that view at this time - it's an educated guess, but not particularly unscientific.

Here is a method of agriculture that can save lives, make food grow where it normally wouldn't and produce products tailored to consumer's wishes, and by far the biggest and most central reason we don't employ it is because people don't understand it, and are made to fear it.

The concern is unforeseen consequences - the unknowable unknowns, to borrow Donald Rumsfeld's terminology. There's a strong parallel in the debate over nuclear energy and the emergence of the anti-nuclear power movement.