Regarding testing bacteria in water, coming from a background of infectious disease, here are my opinions:
1. Testing bacteria in the water does not tell you what bacteria on the coral and what problems they can cause. Because they can be wildly different.
2. When a harmless bacteria over populated, it can cause disease.
Regardless how many data gathered by this testing efforts, the data base that generated is not useful to help identify coral diseases that cause RTN or STN.
That reminds me a story I was told by a professor:
A man was looking for something under a lamp post on the street at night, when asked, he said he was looking for his keys.
When asked where he lost his keys, he said he lost them on the dark street several blocks away. When he was asked why he was searching them under the lamp post, he said because he could see well because there was light here.