The widespread opinion is that the Space Shuttle was a colossal blunder and diverted a huge amount of funding into a dead end program, and misled a great amount

The widespread opinion is that the Space Shuttle was a colossal blunder and diverted a huge amount of funding into a dead end program, and misled a great amount of engineers all over the world, to the point where national programs had huge versatile spaceplanes in the plans (some still do! mostly in the zombie mode though). A fleet of specialized spacecraft could have been way more productive than a jack of all trades and master of none. Productive in absolutely every sense - output-wise, job-wise, infractructure-wise, innovation-wise, sustainability-wise. Shuttle was a political artifact and the reason behind the downturn (or at least one of the factors), not a victim of it. DC is a niche spacecraft that makes much more sense than Shuttle.