Blue Origin did a soft landing from above the Karman line. SpaceX is trying to do that from orbit. The former involves speeds 10x less and energies 100x less than the latter.
Still a hard thing to do no matter how you look at it, but the two goals are not trivial to compare.
The best numbers I can find say that the Falcon 9 stage separation is at around 80km and 2km/sec (2.8 MJ/kg of total energy), and the Falcon 9 has so far failed to land under power.
But what I see on video is Bezos landing a rocket and Musk blowing up a rocket.
I understand the technical differences, but in terms of media, this is a pure win.
Let's try comparing those on more than just media, shall we ?
Financially speaking, between the two goals, there's enough money concentrated in private individuals' hands that you might be able to find six people willing to shell out for space tourism.
Government funding supplies the ISS. A laudable goals, but there's a grim realpolitik view that suggests it's not as guaranteed sustainable of a market as space tourism.
On the other hand, SpaceX's goals also allow for deployment of orbital payloads... Now that's lucrative.
You make a very good point about public perception. But your opening line seems sarcastic and aggressive. I think that's why your comment is light grey.
Orbital velocity is in the vicinity of 7500 to 8000 m/s. At that speed your KE is 1/2.m.v^2 which is about 32e6 Joules/kg.
Orbits are, conveniently, at about 320 km, so your PE is m.g.h, or about about 3.2e6 Joules/kg.
In other words, the energy to get to orbit is ten times the energy to get to the altitude of orbit, and this exercise only got to 1/3 of that. So the energy involved was about 1/30 of that required to put something in orbit.
It's still a fantastic achievement, and an important - nay, critical - step on the way to properly reusable rockets, but it does lend some perspective to it.