While it's probably true that increasing the iteration time on design will get you to a stable tokamak design faster, comparing the time it took to get to ITER

While it's probably true that increasing the iteration time on design will get you to a stable tokamak design faster, comparing the time it took to get to ITER is not really a fair comparison. With large scale mechanical engineering projects, scaling the size down will create a world of new problems that ITER never ran into. They will need to solve these all in house, whereas the tokamak design for ITER had the best researchers all over the world working on it. I'm actually more surprised that skunk works makes youtube videos now. I can almost feel the engineers cringing when PR came to them with this idea...