It's interesting how diametrically different are the mindsets of engineers in one hand and the general public on the other. When I saw the video I thought it was a very bad news for SpaceX's name and I imagine some people might think the same. Like that one time when a Tesla car got fire. I remember reading news that highlighted the dangers of electric cars, etc., but then some commentators quickly pointed out the obvious: gasoline vehicles catch fire all the time.

But the point is, it's in benefit of everybody to get educated about engineering issues. I hope media outlets don't start going like "SpaceX: Too Dangerous? A rocket may land in your backyard". For me at least, it's interesting to learn that they WANT to break the thing to find the weak spots.

Yes. If you read interviews, they had stuff like Elon having complaints that they aren't pushing the envelope hard enough since they don't get any crashes.

Maybe they tested the control system's abilities by pushing it over very quickly.

I bet there's people at SpaceX who were involved on the DC-X that did a successful translation to horizontal and back in 1995. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv9n9Casp1o

Hope SpaceX has enough spare hardware that they can get quickly back up to testing again. I don't see any reason they wouldn't since they have produced quite many leg sets already - maybe they were planning to moving to newer hardware iterations anyway and the vehicle was "expendable", or at least the risk with dangerous tests was more acceptable.