I think I’m convinced that VTOL is a better engineering trade off for space ships rather than making space planes.

It was extremely cool 45+ years ago. But the space race ended, and while government-funded space programs did some fantastic work beyond that (space telescopes and Mars landers), it took capitalism to develop the resuable rocket, then scale it up to Starship proportions.

It also had a large stupid factor. Like one of von Braun's Germans was reported to have said: "they reinvented the wheel -- and made it square."