Ballistic flights make no sense at all. Consider how finicky rocket launches are about weather. So you need to go to the spaceport for your launch, hope that you don't get scrubbed by the weather and save a few hours? Hard to see how that makes any sort of business sense.
Some of the wind sensitivity comes from the hulls being long and narrow. SpaceX's Starship design will be much wider and thus more robust compared to their Falcon 9 rocket.
From the article, it sounds like that's just the cost of development. They're going to need a hefty chunk on top of that for lobbying.