> IIRC the Falcon 9 engine design is the opposite of an RS-68, which is the "one huge fucking engine" design philosophy, which is why a falcon9 has a cluster of many smaller engines and is tolerant of an individual engine failure during launch.

Indeed! A Falcon 9 mission has lost an engine mid-flight, and the flight system adjusted the burn duration on the fly to compensate:

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/spacex-s-non-fatal-failure