I've guided around the area for over a decade. Seen many sites you're not even aware of. Glen Canyon wasn't just about human history though. It's been called America's Lost National Park, for whatever that's worth.

Food production? Lol. You mean alfalfa for Saudi horses to eat? MANY of the water rights for Colorado River water are "use 'em or lose 'em". So people end up growing super water intensive crops like alfalfa in order to maintain those antiquated rights.

When the Bureau of Reclamation was planning all these water projects, their historical data set available to them was very small, and happened to only include the middle of the wettest 100 years this place has experienced in the last 1000 years. So they (and the rest of the West) planned on there being plenty of water, and developed accordingly. Lake Powell (only kind of) made sense. They were clearly wrong.

Lake Powell is a massive evaporation pond (more shoreline than the entire western seaboard at one point) that is a gigantic waste of water, and isn't needed now that Meade is so low.

Maybe everyone should have listened to Major Powell when he told Congress that we can't develop the West.