Earlier quoted context omitted.
Soyuz has done a good job of making spaceflight routine, but unfortunately it's a bit of a dead end (if only for political / organizational reasons, but also the technology hasn't been updated in decades). I was directly comparing to the Shuttle, which cost more like $450mm per launch. And yeah, maybe Crew Dragon won't drop to $6mm, but Starship (next) pretty plausibly could, if it works.
The RD-180 is an extremely high performance engine. It first flew in 2000.
I think that comment was aimed at the architecture. Soon all non-reusable systems will be out of date.
