The Shuttle pushed the envelope in a dozen different ways and always operated right on the edge, which made it incredibly complicated and caused it to require extensive refurbishment after each flight.

If you look at costs relative to constructing new launchers, reusing the Shuttle was quite cost effective. Cost per launch was in the neighborhood of $500 million, while the cost of building a new orbiter was in the neighborhood of $2 billion. The trouble was just that the system was so expensive that even the reused cost was really high compared to expendables.

None of that applies to Falcon. It's a conservative system and it's already one of the cheapest out there without any reuse. If they match the Shuttle on cost reduction (launching a reused vehicle costs 25% of the original) then they'll have substantially dropped the cost of getting things into orbit, because they're starting at ~$60 million per vehicle, instead of billions.