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I find it very hard to understand why they didn't build the most heavy duty launchpad of all time when it was the largest / most powerful launch of all time.

Debate about "value" aside, does this not indicate some bad engineering choices? The entire failure sequence seems to have been caused by this choice, if I understand correctly.

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The typical approach (a deep flame trench) is likely impossible due to the high water table so close to the beach. Some other novel approaches are likely possible, and I'm sure they'll now pursue one, but coming up with and building a design would probably have taken awhile, and they apparently did some testing that suggested they could get away with not doing it, at least for a bit. It's now obvious that they were wrong, but if they had been right, they would have acquired a bunch of data that would have unblocked a bunch of additional development on the vehicle itself that could have proceeded in parallel with improvements to the launch facilities (the one they're already building in Florida has a conventional flame trench) that they otherwise would have had to wait months for while more-extensive launch facilities were built, so it wasn't necessarily irrational, knowing what they knew at the time.

They could have made the tower taller and the launch mount correspondingly higher to allow room for a diverter below the launch mount.

They thought it'd blow up on the launchpad. The effort to protect against that kind of explosion isn't worth it

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