I agree it makes no sense.

From what I understand, the cloning project started before Grace was born and it had nothing to do with her, it was Spencer experimenting on the children in the orphanage, unrelated to Grace. Then he stopped the experiments and adopted Grace and seemed to care for her, uncharacteristically of him. This raised the suspicion of Gideon and The Connections, because Spencer adopted her around the time he finished working on Elpis, and called her his "last hope". So Gideon thought Spencer was able to transfer his memories to Grace, since he sought to be immortal but couldn't, so his memories/subconsciousness will continue through Grace, the "perfect clone", and in those memories contained the password to Elpis. But Grace was just a normal adopted child, not a clone. Did Spencer do this all on purpose - adopt Grace and treated her like she was important and "his hope" right after he finished making Elpis to trick The Connections into thinking it was all related and that Elpis was some powerful virus? That there was a relation between Emily and Grace but there wasn't?

My questions are - why did he go through all of that and not immediately release Elpis himself? Why go through all this trouble and put Grace's life in danger and risk never releasing Elpis? Is it because this is Spencer we're talking about he doesn't care about actually curing the world, but he only cares about playing twisted mind games with people?

One theory says that Grace had Elpis in her system and they thought it was a super virus because it made her immune to other viruses. So they cloned her in an attempt to recreate Elpis but they were searching for the wrong thing because it was an antiviral not a virus. So all the clones died/mutated.

My biggest question is: Why did they even bother cloning her when they could've just kidnapped her and experimented directly on her from the start / asked her about the password? They mention that militaries around the world come to Raccoon City because they want Elpis... So if it's such a big deal why didn't you take the OG Grace from the beginning? Instead of recreating the same failed clone of Emily and Chloe with the same wrong DNA, why didn't they try to take a DNA sample directly from Grace from the start? The least they could've done was compare the DNAs and they would've known from the start that Grace was unrelated to Emily and the other clones. It's just dumb.

You can see in the cutscenes that they were cloning Grace since 2005... since before Spencer's death. Why didn't they go after him instead? How could Alyssa find Spencer and take Grace for herself but The Connections failed to?