[GizmoSwan]

Nope. A purposely designed aircraft is simulated is not one that is elongated with flight control data being patched.

Example of how it works: https://www.darcorp.com/advanced-aircraft-analysis-software/

The bureaucracy had nothing to do with it. They did not want to spend the money to create a new craft. The long bodies aircraft was not airworthy physically speaking and so the software was designed to limit its pitch to prevent it from stalling.

All aircrafts can stall and some angle of attack but a long+narrow aircraft is way more sensitive.

Design of an aircraft from scratch would have flagged it as poor design right away.

[Cogito]

As pointed out in some other comments, SpaceX do extensive simulations, they almost certainly have the best rocket simulations in the world (see some of the published talks on youtube to see the state of their research).

We know that their simulations/calculations were excellent for these last couple of Starship tests because the tests themselves were excellent. There were a number of things being tested, including things like flying multiple Raptor engines, turning those engines off, switching between different fuel tanks for launching and landing, the bellyflop maneauver, the landing flip maneauver, engine relight from the header tank, and finally landing. Almost all of these were perfect, from what information we have.

There have been two failures, and from what we know these were not related to simulations at all - they seem to be system/integration issues, though we don't really know much about the engine failing to relight this test.

On SN8 they had a pressure issue feeding the engines from the header tanks. It may have been possible to anticipate this or test it independently, but it was probably the least important of all the things being tested. Given that they have multiple new (and updated!) test articles rolling off the production line they clearly made the choice to conduct the test without spending years trying to validate every single component. Again, they obviously did a lot of excellent engineering despite not undertaking a long pre-flight validation, as the test was so succesful.

[gridspy]

Both you and I agree that aerospace companies should do large scale vehicle simulations, which they do.

In addition SpaceX does complex fluid dynamics simulations to design and test their engines. That's likely part of why they have successfully made the "holy grail" of Full-Flow staged combustion work in the Raptor. [0]

None of the failures so far could have been detected through simulation since they were complex integration issues. At some point the cost of simulation is vastly larger than the cost of just creating a test article.

Components like drogue chutes, explosive bolts, failsafe valves and abort systems are typically validated both analytically (by reviewing designs) and are often hard to fully validate by testing.

Since validating components is so expensive, it leads companies that rely on analyitical validation (like Boeing) to become overly attached to previously analysed and working components because analysis is so time consuming and expensive. You end up with modern rockets built with space-shuttle engines as components (SLS) and old jets with new engines tacked on (747 Max).

When you talk about explosive deconstruction of a test article after something new was learnt you fail to realise the learning (not the landing) was the goal. If SN9 had landed correctly, it is very likely they would have deconstructed it anyway. They just deconstructed SN12, 13 and 14 to make way for SN15 which has a very improved design.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbH1ZDImaI8 "Is SpaceX's Raptor engine the king of rocket engines?"