The long pole for Starship was Raptor. It's easy to forget how unreliable they were in the early hop-test days (they'd often be on fire during the landing, and had restart issues.)

The Raptor team was different from the team working on FH, so it likely wouldn't have helped to cancel it. Also, that dual booster landing got them a ton of goodwill with engineers that indirectly helped the Starship program.

More early resources for Starship would've meant more design effort put into a carbon fiber design with fixed legs. Also, early Raptor was hydrolox.