I mean they practically used a water tower to test their starship engines. while in parallel they worked for rocket design just to test the first flight/landing and yet in parallel another deisgn for orbital flight tests etc. It seems a waste but this aproach has allowed them to be years ahead of ULA in rocket design. In this case I think they have demonstrated how they work and it's fair to assume that these problems are not engineering miscalculations but deliberate "go with the fastest thing you can test" decisions.

That works for building rockets one at a time. It works less so for mass producing consumer electronics. Lines cost a lot of money to set up, and economies of scale exist.

  {
    "dishGetStatus": {
      "deviceInfo": {
        "id": "ut01000000-00000000-0000e586",
        "hardwareVersion": "rev1_pre_production",
        "softwareVersion": "db6b5d22-a642-43d6-bbec-97a816e3dbd6.uterm.release",

I always back off from the maximum limits for the gear I design then after years in the field and proven reliability you can remotely update it and push things a bit. And that's in production. This is beta

It’s like.. hey guys, the rest of the world has been designing satellite dishes for 40 years that addressed these problems including very low cost stuff from the satellite TV era. Why didn’t SpaceX learn from the rest of the industry instead of having to rediscover it?

Elon Musk famously works by „first principles“, which can indeed be roughly translated to „discover everything yourself“. The advantage is that it gives a clean slate for approaches considered impractical when the books were written.

I'm not sure when that has ever worked out like that though. SpaceX built on a lot of existing aerospace knowledge. Tesla went through a lot of manufacturing hell trying to automate what turned out to be pretty unautomatable parts of manufacturing a car. As far as I know, whatever you think of the EV, the car manufacturing process Tesla has isn't uniquely good.

Phones aren't supposed to be used in such situations at all, so it's hard to carry over design lessons from there. Plus the radio frequencies used are new, unlike phones.

Means the antenna is not even outdoor rated

We have a thermometer with a black plastic sensor (why?!) in our balcony. When the sun hits it in mid-morning, it gets up to 120°F, even when the actual ambient temperature is more like 65°F.

They put the limit there in the first place, so why did they choose that temperature? Keep in mind these terminals need to last 5-10 years in these conditions. The motorized antenna is another part that is known to fail in extreme weather. Let's revisit this in a couple years when they have a decent amount of customers.