[forgottenpass]

But is that really the case or am I just living in the Musk-worship echo chamber?

It's probably not the Musk echo chamber, your assumptions carry the telltale scent of the "large corporations can't do anything right!" echo chamber. They're slower, suffer from inefficiencies caused by scale, more risk-adverse, etc... But they're not outright incompetent the way startup-fellating media leads you to believe.

Boeing could have just delivered better. Or they delivered worse but Boeing's track record covered the spread in a reasonable way. Or in a nepotistic way. The fun part is that unless they blew SpaceX out of the water, you'll never know which of the three it is!

[api]

It's not large corporations per se, but traditional government contracting where the implicit incentive is to deliver minimum value at maximum cost.