[ajross]

> Better to [...]

That's undeniably true. Nonetheless "Better than the shuttle, which sucked" isn't the design goal.

The question is not even just "is it better to blow up 12 Starships?", which would probably still be true. It's "Why isn't Starship working yet?" and the implied "Maybe Starship sucks too?!".

[cwillu]

They failed far more than 12 landings before they started reliably landing boosters, and people made the same “maybe this is a dumb idea” comments back then too.