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It took months to more than a year to repair shuttle’s heatshield in some cases. SpaceX replaced the entirety of the heatshield with a new design and a new ablative underlayment in a matter of weeks. I suspect they will be able to do it even quicker with design and process improvements. Small scale repairs of the heatshield between flights probably wont be all that big of a deal.

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The fact that Starship is unmanned probably helps expedite the change process quite a bit vs. the manned Space Shuttle. If you want to "just try something" the most you can lose is money, and not create a national political scandal.

I think the problem with shuttle was more fundamental. most of the tiles for Shuttle were custom cut to fit exactly one spot on one orbiter. I've read that NASA replaced about 75 tiles per mission, and that 2/3rds of the cost of refurbishing a shuttle after flight was the TPS. so the cost of trying something out was massive.

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