I think a big part of the problem is that a lot of companies are cost-plus government contractors first and sell rockets to the civilian market as an afterthoug

I think a big part of the problem is that a lot of companies are cost-plus government contractors first and sell rockets to the civilian market as an afterthought. Which means that their internal structure and processes are optimized for that use case - not really caring so much about costs, but putting a lot of effort into documenting. So when someone comes along that optimizes on cost and velocity and eschews cost plus contracts, that can be very difficult to deal with. Also, as other people have mentioned, they pretty clearly do have exceptional tech - they routinely land orbital class boosters which has only been done with prototype rockets (it's very different landing when you can hover vs when you can't). And Raptor and Merlin are among the best rocket engines that have ever been made. And even more impressive than specific components is their production and operational expertise. Being able to launch so many rockets flawlessly is a truly astounding feat. In a couple of years, Falcon 9 might even beat out the RD-108/107's total accumulated flight time record, which I thought wouldn't happen for a very long time. Edit: for context, the RD-108/107 are the engines used on the Soyuz, which (as a family) has a truly astounding number of flights. To be fair to SpaceX, though, Soyuz accumulated those over many decades.