Maybe they tested the control system's abilities by pushing it over very quickly.
I bet there's people at SpaceX who were involved on the DC-X that did a successful translation to horizontal and back in 1995. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv9n9Casp1o
Hope SpaceX has enough spare hardware that they can get quickly back up to testing again. I don't see any reason they wouldn't since they have produced quite many leg sets already - maybe they were planning to moving to newer hardware iterations anyway and the vehicle was "expendable", or at least the risk with dangerous tests was more acceptable.
But the point is, it's in benefit of everybody to get educated about engineering issues. I hope media outlets don't start going like "SpaceX: Too Dangerous? A rocket may land in your backyard". For me at least, it's interesting to learn that they WANT to break the thing to find the weak spots.
It seems pretty reasonable you break your things while you're testing them out - I mean, we've all see those car crash commercials, right?