How is Starship dumb exactly? Making a new thing at any extreme of our current capability is going to be hard and its not unexpected when something goes wrong. What would be dumb is if they put human lives on the line

It had no payload on any of its flights. Rockets that have enough time/money put into development to have a reasonable expectation of working on the first try (and don’t have such a unique design) normally launch with a payload on their first flight. Sometimes, even those fail on the first few flights. Having the first few of a new rocket design fail before reliability is achieved is common (ex: Astra) and SpaceX’s other rocket, the Falcon 9, is known as the most reliable rocket, even achieving landings more often than most others do launches.

Starship, as it is right now, is already a better rocket than SLS. It can already carry more mass and be cheaper (even fully expended) than the SLS’s 4 billion cost per launch.

It will get better. Falcon 9 didn’t land the first time either, but now it has successfully landed more consecutive times than any other rocket has flown.

There’s nothing wrong with saying this is a test. This is only a test, and we don’t expect it to be perfect yet. Each time they learn from the data. And SpaceX hasn’t repeated the same mistake twice.