Some brotherman shared this gem.
Few things:
1. He never graduated college
2. He can't build a fence correctly
3. The closest he's gotten to expertise in rocketry is giving talks at small conventions few attend using notes he probably just pulled from Wikipedia.
Disregarding his lack of qualifications, there could be any number of reasons for this not being incompetence:
1. They didn't want to bother getting clearance from army corps of engineers to build a new launchpad; this isn't their only site. Most of their paid launches are from government facilities. Given they're corporate rat fucks they could even be using this as a gambit to get their heavy launch site at Kennedy space center cleared through environmental impact assessment ("We just blew up one of our launchpads, do you want the space industry delayed because we don't have additional sites due to government red tape?").
2. The water table in that location is high (you can see water pooling in this picture), meaning reinforcement structures would have to be built above ground or into water below ground. What does this mean in the end? I don't fucking know. But it might not just be as easy as saying "Just reinforce it, bro!" due to the local characteristics.
3. They're gathering data. SpaceX is planning to launch rockets from Mars eventually. It's perhaps unlikely water jets will be an economical use of Martian water, and it's unlikely that there will be reinforced pads on Mars, at least not for the first few times they reuse rockets there. For the first test launches that aren't carrying payloads and aren't required to get more than a few minutes of flight to be considered successful, this is a cheap opportunity to see what kind of damage the rocket engines sustain from launching from an underdeveloped site, and to see what kind of damage its rockets will do to soil (this could influence choosing landing sites). Earth and Martian soil won't be the same, gravity also isn't the same, but it's data nonetheless, and it's likely rockets will absolutely wreck Martian soil until infrastructure gets built up there. They won't want to do this when they actually are launching cargo.
Instead he jumped immediately to the conclusion that they didn't anticipate the landing site would be destroyed because Elon Musk bought Twitter. Even if it was completely unanticipated, it's not a huge failure given the company's scale, and I'm certain ten years ago Pat would've been riding Elon's dick about a successful three minute test launch before he realized what his politics were.
We're all roughly as unqualified as Pat is concerning rocketry, but the point I'm trying to make is you can exercise critical thought when you speculate why Muskman's company did things the way it did before jumping straight to accusing incompetence of the people who have successfully lowered rocketry costs. And also he's fat.
