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Most of the differences are due to genetics of the various strains (read: breeds like different kinds of apples).
Different growing techniques can only maximize the genetic potential of the strain you are working with. You can't take schwag seeds and use growing techniques to produce some fancy strain, any more than you can take a golden delicious seeds and produce granny smiths.
When you are trying to produce good weed, its all about the genetics you start with.
To this end, most people buy cuttings (clones) from someone else and grow one of those into a large "mother" plant and then take further cuttings from that "mother" to sustain their garden.
When talking about the different strains, the differences are due to varying relative proportions of secondary compounds in the strains. Weed has a lot of secondary compounds.
Secondary compounds are molecules that are not involved in the metabolism sustaining living systems (molecules all living things use). Rather, these compounds serve extrametabolic functions (or sometimes none at all) and are often the result of evolutionary dynamics like competition, predation, or mutualism. Compounds like neem from the neem plant that works as a natural insecticide and many others. Extreme evolutionary pressure in high competition environments like rainforests produce some weird shit and pharmaceutical companies spend lots of money looking for new species and new compounds around the world. And pretty much all psychoactive compounds are secondary compounds.
Weed is pretty unique in that the species has secondary compounds numbering in the thousands (Cannabis sativa: The Plant of the Thousand and One Molecules). The biochemistry of secondary compounds in weed is extremely complex although only a small fraction of those are psychoactive (still a lot though). This complexity results in a high level of potential variation allowing breeders to produce strains with very different properties through artificial selection. Hence the nearly endless strains of weed.
However, for people smoking weed, most of the difference in strains is flavor and appearence. There are a lot of claims made about differences in psychoactive properties between the strains, though imo these tend to be way, way overblown and have not been tested in clinical settings. In my experience, the differences in "highs" between strains aren't any greater then the difference in buzz between something like whiskey and vodka.
As far as thc content (the psychoactive compound that has been most well studied), breeds have already hit an upper limit of just under 40%. To achieve high percentages, the industry has already moved on from breeding to producing concentrates through secondary processing (bubble hash, wax, oil, etc...). These methods attempt to isolate and extract the thc compounds resulting in extremely high concentrations, but missing out on the many other secondary compounds found in weed.
When it comes to potential healing properties of weed, there is definitely a lot to investigate. When you are talking about that huge number of compounds, there is a chance some may have real potential for pharmaceutical development. There is a large number of academic studies investigating this around the world right now. The problem is that there are so many compounds in weed, it is hard to know which one or what combinations are producing what effects.
One recent success is with CBD (cannabidiol). This compound has been shown to be effective in treating a few very specific conditions. Never mind the cbd hysteria taking over the country with fucking Special person snake oil claims. That cbd creme? You got ripped off. Nevertheless, the compound has been shown to be effective in a few specific treatments (but no you dumb motherfuckers, it is not a cure-all wonder drug. And fucking no, rubbing it on your skin is not going to do shit). Other studies have shown promising evidence that there are other compounds in weed that may help treatment for other illnesses. However, there has been extreme difficulty in isolating which compounds are producing the results.
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