Most launch vehicles are place holders in general. Once the technology freeze comes into place they will rarely add on modern innovations to existing/nearly complete launch vehicles. They're basically out of date on the first launch. Even during the hay day of the Saturn V they were working on the next one and they were working on several for the space shuttle. The Falcon 9 program is much a demo/test bed and will probably never make profit, but the successors of it 100% will be profitable if not very different from what we'd expect.

The ISS was a placeholder originally to prevent Russian brain drain and keep funding for nasa going.