Indeed. Just look at Blue Origin. They've well funded, they've got tons of high caliber engineers (rocket scientists even), they've been "bending metal" and building real hardware for years, and they've had pretty good designs, but they're far behind SpaceX in terms of progress. While SpaceX was launching rockets, earning dollars, and doing R&D with launch vehicle leftovers Blue Origin was still mired in the midst of building an orbital launcher.

This is a good example of both "worse is better" and the MVP concept. The Falcon 9 is not the best design for a reusable launcher that one could put together, I could list easily half a dozen optimizations that would lead to a vastly superior reusable vehicle, for example. But by going the expendable mode first route, and building a dead simple vehicle (2 stage LOX/Kerosene, a 60+ year old design) they've been able to iterate, do full-scale testing, and earn income. Income is the life blood of any operation, so being able to bring in profits early made it easier for SpaceX to invest in rocket R&D. And by using the expendable -> reusable route they're able to gain a lot of confidence in the behavior of their rocket as well as get multi-million dollar test vehicles to play with, all financed by their customers.