>tells me you don’t pay attention all that much to what actually goes on inside the aerospace industry.

Be careful about making judgements based on one paragraph. I've followed aerospace for decades, since Gemini, since the X-15, and since communications satellites made transcontinental communications possible as an exotic occurrence and then more and more commonplace. Saw the first Landsat images and have followed how it and its successors and offshoots have improved the understanding of land use and climate change and eco-disasters. It's impossible to overstate the extent of the changes to the understanding of ecology. Saw the pale blue dot photo when it was made. Watched Hubble launch and followed the details of the mirror misfortune, the deep reasons, not the popular press ones. All along with the spy satellite connection to the mirror. And yes, the magnificent photos and increase of knowledge about galaxy formation and black holes - and the first exoplanets. Well, enough on me paying attention to the broader achievements.

SpaceX didn't just impress me with the rocketry of the reusable Falcon 9 - and landing boosters 150+ times is especially impressive since no one else has done it once. Deploying Starlink is something that's having a tremendous impact in many fields. Setting up a production line that produces thousands of satellites is unprecedented. OneWeb is doing pretty well with hundreds, I haven't ignored others in aerospace. SpaceX developed the Dragon spacecraft, which includes innovations others inside the aerospace industry did not manage - the Starliner has a lot of compromises and not a lot of innovation. The need for 28 thrusters, some from different suppliers, is the opposite of elegant design. Idk if you include spacecraft with rocketry, I'm just demonstrating that I pay more attention to what's going on inside the space industry than you thought.

I say far more than anyone else, and far ahead, because the F9 has been landing 1st stages for 7 years and the next credible competitor will be Rocket Lab with Neutron. If we posit 2025 for its successful landings that puts SpaceX a decade ahead of the rest. (China is hard to guess about, but I'd be surprised at a landing with reuse before 2024.) SpaceX has developed the first flightworthy full-flow staged combustion engine, with an insanely high chamber pressure. The closest anyone has come with a new engine is Blue Origin with BE-4, a partial flow staged combustion engine with a remarkably low chamber pressure. Tbf, it was the proper goal to set themselves for their 1st powerful engine - but it does help contrast the Raptor with the rest of industry. (I separate its success from Starship's because the latter's is far from assured and would be distracting.) (The legacy aerospace companies worked on full flow staged combustion but didn't progress from what were essentially bench top versions.) Yes, this is all about rocketry but I am once again proving I do pay attention to what goes on within the aerospace industry. I'm also aware Skylon is chasing the SSTO dream. Some company is pursuing suppressed-sound supersonic commercial aircraft. All sorts of stuff is going on. The sensitivity and pixel count of sensors for the next space telescopes, and the supporting data storage, etc, increases incredibly year by year.

The deep science JWST will produce and the various impacts of cheap access to LEO and beyond are to an extent apples and oranges. You said "to me personally", and that's fine, you prefer apples. I pay more attention to the oranges of rocketry and human spacecraft, but I'm definitely aware of the rest. At the end of the day, to me personally what SpaceX has done is a sequence of engineering that's the greatest feat of the last 5-7 years.

Edit: OK, maybe I went a little overboard here...