With all due respect, I think you still define it as a competition or veiled gamification. The people at SpaceX are largely all scientists, engineers and the l

With all due respect, I think you still define it as a competition or veiled gamification. The people at SpaceX are largely all scientists, engineers and the like and they build the best they could do with available data. It got them a lot further this time based on the previous data. That is the only metric that really counts. If they got good data they can use to “debug” the rocket (to speak in HN familiar terms) that is a great thing for them, and very valuable.