[myself248]

Exactly as OP said, launcher failures happen and then you drive down their frequency.

Landing failures are still quite expected, especially on the first few tries. It's weird that they even tried on the first launch, but I don't even think of it as a try, I think of it as a "let's gather some data, and in the freakishly unlikely occurrence that everything goes perfect on the way down, we might as well load the landing software too".

[zitterbewegung]

I read about spaceship on one of their launches is that they attempted everything that it could possibly do on one of their boosters because you basically have the next iteration built so why not attempt anything for the telemetry.