[ChrisFoster]

No, I'd say it was an almost-complete success. The point of this was to test several things which they've never tested before and gather data to drive design improvements. They successfully tested: ascent under three engines, flap-controlled aerodynamic descent to the landing site, the landing flip maneuver - including drawing propellant from the header tanks - and final landing burn.

They didn't stick the landing, but it looks like they got test data from all the planned test activities. The explosion will prevent gathering some data from post-flight inspection, but other than that I doubt it has much affect on future development.

To look back on SN5/SN6 testing, they stuck the landings with those prototypes, but the prototypes themselves are now obsoleted by the new prototypes in production (up to SN16?!)

[sq_]

It sounds like they've got SN9 just about ready to go, too, so they should be able to put the data that they gathered to good use quite soon.

Seems to be a great benefit of this method that SpaceX is following with Starship: if you build hardware fast and cheap enough, you can afford some partial failures since you just put the lessons learned into the next flight in a few weeks.