Oh, absolutely. And yet... the consensus among most of the oldguard was that that approach wouldn't work. Many in the industry thought that reuse had effectively failed due to the lessons of Shuttle and the real future lie in expendables. Additionally, the old guard at NASA that WERE into reuse were generally for single-stage, horizontal landing architectures. In the specific case of the GNC specialist that told me it was impossible, he actually said this AFTER SpaceX had proved Falcon 9 VTVL on land! He thought the relative motion of the droneship would make the landing effectively impossible... I disagreed.

The phrase "hindsight is 2020" applies to Elon's accomplishments in spades... anything he hasn't achieved yet is an "obvious con" and "impossible" while past achievements were "merely a matter of throwing engineers at the problem"...

One of the reasons nobody tries seriously before was economics. They came to the conclusion that it was simply cheaper to not reuse boosters due to the overall low number of launches. And whether that is true or not cannot be evaluated without SpaceX results being published.