So far in the history of technology, deliberate design over a period of years has proven consistently less clever (in the sense of "efficiently capturing available mass-energy as living bodies")

... because we don't know how to build "living bodies". That's a rather unfair comparison, regardless of whether your point is valid.

Although, of course, we built factory farms for that exact purpose, which are indeed more efficient at that task.

And there's genetic engineering, which can leapfrog over millions of years of evolution by nicking (simple, at our current tech level) adaptations from other organisms - whereas evolution would have to recreate them from scratch. I reflexively avoid anti-GM stuff due to overexposure when I was younger, but I wouldn't be surprised if a GM organism could outcompete a wild one, were a mad scientist to choose that as a goal rather than a disaster to be elaborately defended against. (Herbicide-resistant plants, for a start.)

So I suppose it isn't even very good at biasing the results, since it can still fail - depending, of course, on how true of a scotsman you are, because those do take advantage of prexisting adaptations - and artificially induced ones, in the case of farm animals.

(Should this matter? Discuss.)