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After watching Man of Steel and looking at our current technological feats, why did the Emperor think that taking in Space Marine and Adeptus Custodes aspirants would work better than creating them before they were ever born? It takes time, effort, resources to watch these aspirants fail and thus a wasted effort. They go through lengthy rituals and rites to prove their worthiness, when the Imperium is on the brink of destruction, it seems utterly illogical to be spending time doing such. Two examples are the Blood Angels and Dark Angels: the former having to traverse the barren wastelands, avoid or fight scorpion-like creatures, climb a mountain and then when the Blood Angels arrive, they pick a couple and the rest are made to guard the site for the rest of their lives. The latter has aspirants stay awake for a 3 day indoctrination process or else they are turned into servitors. Custodians are offered up as babies at the front of the Imperial Palace to the current Custodes and only a few are picked. They don't know if they will succeed, so again, why go through the lengthy process of training, only to probably fail? If you hand-pick certain genetic traits of successful warriors, hard-code them into an embryo and place them in vitae wombs, you've more than likely going to more success having a pre-modified aspirants than ones that are post-modified. Not to mention that doing vitae wombs like the Death Korps of Kreig, you're going to be able to pump out more warriors at a faster rate. Chapters go from world to world picking the strongest they can find, but the innocent are weak and the criminals are probably the only viable candidates. Konrad Curze had to endure with his Legion and realized that most of his "sons" were psychopaths, murderers, rapists, etc. Again, hard-code them genetically to be more compliant. I know it's science fiction and you have to suspend your beliefs, but don't you think that the Emperor, over his 30,000+ years of life, would have thought to practice this method? Thoughts?

I can think of a number of ways.

1: to maintain a connection among the legions to the people they are fighting for, even if it's a minor connection, the Legionarres knew they sprang from mere mortals and thus felt more connected to them (Astartes are diconnected from mere mortals eneugh as it is. making them ina tube would accelerate this)
2: to give the people a link TO the Astartes. every noble house in Terra claims that one of their sons is in fact one of the custodes, it gives them a sense of pride and attachment to the forces of gene enhanced warriors guarding them.
3: it likely ensures that the genetic material among the marines is varied, and they're not all clones, this is actually a good thing and ensures strength and vitaility among the Marines. a good example of the problems of just clining everything can actually be found in Banana's.

It's part of the Grimdark setting and loss of knowledge/technical of ages past.

U less they changed the lore in the times of the Great Crusade such trials wasn't necessary and the sucess rate quite higher if not almost flawless to the point they had alternative genetic upgrades to make older humans in his thirty or forty years(and not teenagers) as efficient as Space marines to join the legions.

With 40k you really need to remember that details came after the fact by a long way. Space Marines were made from teenage aspirants then they started on the details. So lots of things the Emperor decided are veeeeery stupid as a result.

TLDR: Emperor = dum dum.

The Imperium is a religious state, so purely rational/logical arguments and reasoning don't work.

In such a paradigm, there is the ennoblement of suffering and sacrifice, with these being viewed as giving spiritual strength and value to the aspirant. That ineffable spiritual quality is beyond mere genes, or so the Imperium believes anyway.

Also:

Those born superhuman can go whichever way they want in life because they were born superior. This includes using their gifts to destroy the fragile social order for personal gain.

The warrior made gains power incrementally, only so long as they continue to reinforce the social order. The second they show that they have the potential to be the next Horus or Luther, they get cut off and purged.

Genetic superbabies are already genetic superbabies; it makes them harder to discipline and control out of the gate. One rebel was almost responsible for the destruction of the human race. The Imperium does not want another.

Space Marines were always a compromise technology. Genetically engineering a baby and raising it to adulthood has a seriously long turnaround time, so the Space Marine augmentation was designed to be used on any healthy human male so that replacing losses could be relatively quick - at least at the onset of the Imperium. The Emperor was interested in conquering the galaxy as quickly as possible, so this is the kind of shortcut he was willing to take.

There's also the subject of what technology the Emperor had available. We can assume that making the Primarchs took everything the Emperor had - and more, since the Chaos Gods seem to have gotten involved. Perhaps as forge worlds got brought into the Imperium better technology was found, but never implemented because Space Marines were 'good enough' for the time being. So the DKoK vitae wombs may not have been available to the Emperor at the time of Space Marine design.

Loss of knowledge and technology (and geneseed degradation) has made the selection rituals necessary to avoid wasting geneseed. You only choose the most robust subjects if at all possible.

In my opinion it's because the Imperium doesn't understand its own technology and operate under religious and traditionalist assumption. The Space Marine recruit young boys who have survived hardship thinking that their success is a sign of a "strong soul" and strong body that can withstand the transformation process. They don't get that it's a question of genetics and that their tests are functionnaly useless, but at least ot gives them the illusion that strong pre-pubescent boys will make strong Space Marines. There is a certain "logic" behind this idea, but it's based on false assumption.

TL;DR: the Imperium does stupid and insane things often because it's stupid and insane.

It's probably because funny things happen to the soul when it is genetically created, as opposed to being naturally born.

I think its reason why so many of Fabius Bile's clones turn out poorly. We don't actually know what the vitae womb is, but if it is a cloning device then it could explain why Kreigers are such automatons, they lack well-formed souls. The only clones of Fabius, to my knowledge, to not be messed up are Ferrus, Horus, and Fulgrim. Ferrus is dead but his soul still resides within the immaterium, Fulgrim's soul is not part of his body either, and Horus's original soul is gone (Talon of Horus is still on my reading list, but from what I understand the clone has some lapses). They're not blanks, blanks can't be even cloned, but don't have souls like any other soul possessing entity. This is why the primarchs are so special, the Emperor was able to overcome this rule in their creation.

Purely genetically created organisms probably suffer from similar problems to clones. Perhaps conception has some special psychic role in the development of the soul. In a way, the clones might have deamonicesque souls, singularly focused on one or a few aspects. Blanks, with their lack of a soul, are at least balanced, emptiness weighs the same as emptiness.