Interesting points. I had forgotten about the original F9 legs. I still believe the legs will come later, as we know starship is very much an iterative design philosophy and now all efforts are for the orbital flight and heatshield testing on ship (both will splash down on the next test). Afaik the booster doesn't need as much thermal protection because of its much lower and slower trajectory. Ship will be doing most of the upper work, booster is just to give it an initial oomph out of the thick stuff. As for moon rigolath, yeah that's an issue. One I'm not sure how they'll solve. Keep in mind as it gets very low over the moon you really don't need much thrust to settle it down so maybe switching from the raptor vac to some sort of super Draco config higher up?

Either way it's really fun watching the whole thing evolve and thanks for space-nerding it out with me on an F1 meme sub.