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According to Musk, "This rocket was meant to test very high retrothrust landing in water so it didn’t hurt the droneship, but amazingly it has survived." I suspect they never really thought about what it would take to tow it back, and when they did realized they didn't really want to.

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That sounds very likely, and having the USAF do the job right, while a bit of negative PR, is better than losing lives.

Edit: Good points about PR, I missed that.

And, all in all, which negative PR ? This is more positive in the "wicked cool" sense, isn't it ?

I don't think it's negative PR at all. Blowing stuff up is cool as long as nobody gets hurt. Also, people understand that bits and pieces of rockets need recovering or destroying. There's a lot of precedence for this.

Wait, are you saying the core wasn't intending to land on the barge? Why have the barge out there to begin with then?

Different launch. This wasn't the Falcon Heavy core, this was a previous rocket that was intended to crash (for testing purposes). There wasn't a barge out there to catch it (unlike the Heavy).

They didn't have the barge out there.

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