Thank you for a well reasoned argument. I would love some formalism of actual useful lofted weight, vs apparent weight lofted to some stated orbit. Getting 27 tonnes to LEO but leaving 50 tonnes in unstable orbit is not 77 tonnes of useful loft, to me (fictive example)
We could arbitrarily say Energia brings 0 tons on orbit - because it's, strictly speaking, a suborbital rocket, the payload needs to add some ~100 m/s of velocity to get to orbit, this was done to avoid getting empty stage to orbit (so no littering, no necessary maneuver to deorbit). Or, alternatively, we could say Energia brings 170 (!) tons to LEO - indeed, if one pays no attention to factual suborbital speed and adds mass of empty 2nd stage of Energia, which is 78-86 tons (http://buran.ru/htm/rocket.htm), one gets this number.
So it's important to carefully compare similar things. 140 tons for Saturn V is too different from 27 tons of Space Shuttle by method, not by result.