Branson didn't fly on the first flights because SpaceShipTwo is a completely different beast to New Shepard. SpaceShipTwo is a pioneering space plane with MANUAL controls. New Shepard is basically the absolute most boring way you could claim to have "gone to space". It's vastly vastly less interesting and ambitious compared to what SpaceX and even Virgin Galactic are doing.
Automated controls are more ambitious than manual controls. Note that the Apollo 11 was supposed to be totally automated, but Armstrong saved the mission by overriding it and doing it manually.
> most boring
Well, until the automation goes wrong, then it is briefly very exciting.
Nothing to do with the catastrophic bugs in Boeing’s Starliner that caused the failure to reach the ISS and that would have risked the astronauts life if they didn’t fix two issues (literally) on the fly.
Doesn't matter what the excuses were. It was supposed to work, it failed, and Armstrong took over and saved the mission.
> Nothing to do with the catastrophic bugs
Most every software bug today, once rooted out, looks like a mistake only an incompetent programmer would make. Except the best programmers make these mistakes, because humans are fallible.
If I recall correctly, SpaceX had some unintended disassemblies from software problems, too.