Empirically, you're right. Starship has taken much longer than F9 just to reliably put something in orbit. What I don't know--because I'm not in the field--is

Empirically, you're right. Starship has taken much longer than F9 just to reliably put something in orbit. What I don't know--because I'm not in the field--is whether that's because of design complexity (size, need for header tanks, etc.) or because the Starship team is not as tight (larger team, weaker leaders, distracted Musk). Maybe both.