This is part of the reason that it can take so long to comprehend a genuinely innovative new technology: it doesn't win the game that's being played -- it plays a different game entirely.
When airplanes came along, rail companies could quickly (and correctly!) judge that they would never be hauling coal and cattle and such. Therefore: airplanes are just a toy; we can safely ignore them.
Similarly, when television came along, the radio industry said: "people listen to the radio when they are working, driving, or drifting off to sleep. You can't do anything else when you're staring at a screen, so television isn't a threat."
What these industries failed to realise is that while the the new technologies were non-competitive on the use-cases that railways and radios had optimised for, the new entrants could win on metrics that the old industry had never thought to care about.
(All this is fairly standard Christensen disruptive-technology stuff, BTW.)
Anyhow, the thing about the legacy aerospace industry is this: they weren't playing the "let's build and fly rockets" game. They were playing the "let's maximise our funding" game. The rules of this game are as follows:
1. Spend all the money you get, otherwise your budget will be cut next year.
2. Spend even more money than you get, and do as little as you can with it, so that you can plead the necessity of a funding increase next year.
3. The more money you get, the more of a political base you can establish. The more of a political base you've established, the harder it will be to cancel the whole program.
Underlying all of this is the axiomatic assumption that the spaceflight market is essentially inelastic. Weather and positioning and communications and spy satellites need to be launched at more or less any cost, but any reduction in launch prices won't be matched by a corresponding increase in demand. Therefore: if you cut costs, you're just leaving money on the table and putting your political base at risk. Don't do it.
Typical aerospace management was playing this game exceptionally well. NASA's heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System, has spent $14B last time I looked, and is still years away from its first launch. Its launches will cost a billion dollars apiece. That's actually not easy to accomplish. If I gave you $14B and told you -- a person with only a passing interest in space stuff -- that I wanted a heavy-lift rocket in return, I'm quite you could do it. All you need to do is put out a tender for heavy-lift services, with payments made on a milestone/per-launch basis. Award these to several teams to keep things robust and competitive. Job done.
On the other hand, if I gave you $14B and told you to spend it on the appearance of serious rocket development work, I think you'd find it quite challenging. Spending that money without flying a damned thing takes exceptional skill. Hats off to any program manager who can accomplish this!
But when SpaceX comes along and decides that the rules they want to play by are "build and operate the most amount of rocket for the least amount of money", the rest of the industry simply couldn't figure out WTF game SpaceX was playing at. Most of the industry still hasn't figured it out.