Not only do markets appreciate beef, but they will pay top dollar for fancy high-quality beef. Once someone gets growing beef down, it probably won't be much of a stretch to develop top-quality sirloin, and more repeatably.
Additionally, beef is a good target ecologically speaking. Fish and birds are much more efficient at energy conversion, so there's a much larger margin of energy and material savings to be had with beef. As yet even another bonus, I suspect the ratio of edible meat to body mass in beef is much lower than in fish.
> Not only do markets appreciate beef, but they will pay top dollar for fancy high-quality beef.
Maybe. It depends on the extent to which high-end beef consumers are paying for the direct experience (taste, texture, mouth feel, etc) versus other things.
For example, consider the scam that is high-end speaker cable. People pay a lot of extra money not for real quality, but for imagined quality, exclusivity, and brand association. The same thing definitely goes on with wine and cheese, and I'd suspect some beef purchase will be like that, too.
Beef is a case where there are some very obvious things(texture, fattyness, chewyness etc) that make eye fillet a much more pleasant eating experience than other cuts of meat and there's a lot less of it per animal. If you can pull that off you can make the general case of decent meat much more affordable.
Of course, there'll always be Wagyu and Kobe, but that's a much smaller market than just the high end of normal meat.
Additionally, beef is a good target ecologically speaking. Fish and birds are much more efficient at energy conversion, so there's a much larger margin of energy and material savings to be had with beef. As yet even another bonus, I suspect the ratio of edible meat to body mass in beef is much lower than in fish.