What is vegan cheese? Have folks reproduced milk proteins in the lab, or is it taste-and-texture replication?
Then there's the Real Vegan Cheese project in the East Bay, which isn't venture funded and therefor seems to be moving a bit more slowly: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/real-vegan-cheese#/
So it's taste-and-texture replication. I don't even think it is aiming to perfectly replicate dairy cheese, as much as to be something that can be reasonably substituted for dairy cheese in the typical cases where it is used. It's analogous to how soy milk isn't meant to be indistinguishable from dairy milk but instead to be usable in place of dairy milk in coffee, cereal, etc.
It isn't, indeed. I've tried a whole bunch of different vegan cheeses, and while they sometimes call them "mozzarella", "camembert" or other dairy cheese names, they do not try to match the taste. It would be an obviously losing battle as the best they could do is to be as good, most probably and understandably falling short of that. They instead create new kinds of cheese-like products, sometimes taking inspiration from dary cheeses sometimes not, and the results are actually pretty good espectially considered how recent the art of vegan cheese is!
Unrelated, but why is it American's treat soy milk this way? American brands of soy milk are terrible, while Asian brands of soy milk can taste really good.
I personally can't stand the stuff. The main selling point seems to be "it melts like cheese" but in my experience, it takes on a snotty texture. It'd probably help if I was a real vegan and didn't have alternatives...