That's incorrect -- the reason NASA chose Starship is because it was the most capable lander for the lowest possible projected upfront cost. Government contracts always attempt to maximize economic utility while meeting objectives -- any other advantages are ancillary to this.

> Symmetrically, almost all problems can be solved by increasing the mass budget: more fuel to loiter longer, redundant systems, etc...Starship is so hilariously large that there's enough mass budget to solve almost any problem.

Also incorrect. Mass budget does not change fundamental Newtonian physics, nor does it alter the issue of instability caused by a high center of mass. The engineers at SpaceX are very smart and I'm sure they're hard at work trying to engineer out this solution, but it's a bit like saying that you can prevent a car from rolling over if you make it heavy and powerful enough. Sure, but that causes problems and challenges of its own. It would have been easier to engineer the car to have a lower center of mass, i.e. it would be easier to land on the moon with a lander that had its mass spread out over a larger surface area and didn't have an angular moment of inertia significant enough to where topple was a concern -- like the Dynetics or BO proposals.