I wasn't trying to extend the analogy to saying landing F9 is trivial. But F9 surviving re-entry is fairly trivial, which is the important difference between the two. Once you've survived re-entry and slowed down to terminal velocity, there's not a huge difference between landing from orbital and sub-orbital trajectories. I agree that the way it's phrased is fairly meaningless and reeks of baseball commentary cherry-picking, but surviving from orbit is still a very different milestone than surviving from sub-orbit.