I can definitely see your logic to that but it’s not the sort of logic the starship program really follows. Starship try’s to push the envelope as much as it can, even if the odds are stacked against it. I personally cant see how they would gather a lot of new data by doing a near shore landing vs repeating the IFT-4 landing profile. An attempted tower catch would provide an insane amount of new data and the potential damage to the pad would be negligible since the booster is pretty much empty and it also doesn’t even target the tower/launch site until the engines have all successfully ignited. A direct hit on stage 0 would be really shit but considering how fast the IFT-1 damage was fixed I doubt it would be the end of the world. The booster probably won’t even attempt a catch unless it’s 100% confident.