> Cute but it's quite obvious I'm referring to
Comfortable with your own loose wording, but lawyering over others. I see.
> And no, the payload continues to fall and is now not even remotely close to being able to achieve the program goals
Payload was also much lower on early Falcon 9's. Virtually every rocket family is a family and not one model because they get stretched, engines get added and tweaked, etc. Reduced payload capacity is a boring, normal, and expected situation for early production design. Same goes for planes. What you see as failure is an initial qualified engineering milestone. It seems to me that you must understand the concept of iteration. It also seems like you think 50T to LEO is not incredible in and of itself.
Perhaps you are the sort of person who is unhappy at weddings?
This mindset that because something which is under development is not finished yet, it has failed or is failing, can only come from someone who has never made anything themselves. The misunderstanding is so complete. I suppose it's a mindset some folks have to unlearn to help themselves.
> "Starship is a successful program because Starlink makes it economically sustainable" to "I don't care or know what Starship is trying to do, I don't care or know how successfully they're doing it, but rocket go up is a fun ride already."
These are your constructions and do not accurately reflect anything I've said. It seems like you're just looking for arguments and not genuine understanding. I won't give you any more argument. Good evening.
You are continuing to ignore the actual stated goals of the program have been cut back over and over and over. You are acting as if they have held ambitious goals and are marching towards them. The program is clearly not working as they intended or else they would not be cutting their goals.
And no, despite their continuous cutting back on ambition, it's still obviously a remarkable program absolutely chock full of amazing achievements. That does not mean the program is a success or is situated to be a success, which is what the original comment was talking about that you "rebutted" by stating they've achieved an intermediate milestone.