The PG motto is more relevant than ever: make something people want. In that case, make something that people will want in their backyard. Selling is the hard part.
It might very well be that they should have spent more effort on that aspect, but they didn't ignore it.
And the PG motto is great if you want to make money as fast as possible with as little risk as possible. It's not nearly so great if your goal is to make a major change to society.
Following the highway network is great (and Germany largely does it for HSR) but the highway system is designed with very different constraints. That might be possible in largely desert or rural places without a lot of topography, but highways have curves and slopes incompatible with high speed as soon as you hit a significant topography.
The cost of right-of-way skyrockets in urban and dense environments that are exactly the ones you want to serve with HSR/HyperLoop. Both systems are on par in the regard. The mile-long tunnel to bring HSR in the heart of San Francisco is expected to cost several billion dollars. The cost of the technical equipment of that infrastructure for conventional rail is marginal compared to the cost of digging the tunnel itself.
Sure we could solve that, with strong eminent domain powers for the state for instance. But I'm not sure anyone wants that, nor that the Supreme Court would let it happen.
Good luck getting a closed tube through a municipality, let alone a major city, let alone across an entire state.
This is the first result of any actual serious thought being given (well actually a bunch of college senior projects) and the winning design already apparently had to cut the speeds by a third (which makes it no faster than a train) and has no space for passengers or cargo.
Let me repeat that: the first serious proposal is no faster than a train and can't actually be used for transporting anything. Making it, as a suggestion for high speed transport, completely useless.
Yes, although this can be handwaved away by saying it's not a full-scale model and the test track is too short for higher speeds.
What I find more interesting is that the winning design isn't even true Hyperloop, as the air hockey suspension is replaced by maglev. There's no air intake on the front because magnets are used.
The winning design doesn't validate the Hyperloop concept since it replaces a critical element and becomes just a maglev in a tube with a rail. It wouldn't surprise me if the tube disappeared in the next iteration.
Hyperloop is a low-latency low-capacity transport method.
It's not much better at latency/cost than a VacTrain or a regular MagLev, but basically has less than 10% of the capacity.
Basically, the Hyperloop will be a transport method used by a bunch of rich people, not by the ten thousands or hundredthousands of people who'd use a HSR or MagLev on the same route.
The guy makes assumption of single 28 person pod leaving every 30 second to get 3360 passengers/hour throughput. But these parameters are not set in stone. Pods could be joined into platoons that move together to form "trains". With 10 pod platoon you get 33600 passenger/hour -- neary 3x throughput of California High Speed rail when it's built. Pods could also be made wider to accommodate multiple people along cross-section.