There was a lot of wishful thinking with regards to the shuttle program. Some ridiculously fanciful, some plain ignorant. But most of all, it was the test of a

There was a lot of wishful thinking with regards to the shuttle program. Some ridiculously fanciful, some plain ignorant. But most of all, it was the test of a theory put into practice. And it should have been to no one's surprise that many things thought true wern't. How much of that was simply ignorance vs being deliberately oversold is a matter of debate. But what those 133 missions did was impart an operational knowhow and lessons learned that went far beyond the immediate mission objectives. These are the same benefits provided by the ISS today. In short, you really can't begin to determine how well a system works in practice until you put it into production, and start using it a lot. These are the same things SpaceX is learning now (just of a new sort.) It's why Ares is returning to a capsule form. Buran looks much better on paper, and I've no doubt it's an engineer achievement. But the success of a program, and the benefits derived from it can't be determined purely on a theoretical basis. Buran may have been an excellent orbiter, or it could have been terrible. But we'll never know.