I had a chat with Professor Whyte about this about 5 years ago when he was starting on this quest. The key insight that he emphasized to me (that I could unders

I had a chat with Professor Whyte about this about 5 years ago when he was starting on this quest. The key insight that he emphasized to me (that I could understand!) was the need to deal with the engineering. He told me that compact magnets would facilitate construction and maintenance because simply they would need less space and energy to be physically manipulated. This, as I understood it, would allow for huge reductions in cost because buildings and components scale in cost massively as their size increases. Small magnets won't need a huge building, they won't need special vehicles to move them, they won't need cranes to install, they can be swapped in and out during maintenance, and the work can be planned and executed by small teams at low risk. Who really cares if a team of 5 working for a week have a 10% overrun - that's 2.5 person days. On the other hand a team of 500 working for a year -> 50 person years. Scale is the overhead that they are targetting.