The sideways oscillation of the rocket is an obvious control loop problem. When it's working correctly, the booster will remain rock solid vertical and land gracefully. Elon's (now deleted?) tweet said as much.
Let the real rocket scientists fix their rocket. They know how. It's really unbelievably close to working. Amazing really.
By speculating and proposing questions and answers, we're all learning and increasing our understanding of the domain.
We're not causing any harm, so I think it's quite healthy for us to speculate and question what's going on and how it might be fixed. In fact, we even enjoy spending our time on it.
They didn't handle media very well this launch, what with the fumbled video release and then a retracted tweet.
It doesn't. That's just your impression you are placing upon the tweet. Deleting it says nothing when you are the head of multi billion dollar organisations. Perhaps he didn't want to give their competitors information that could help them model F9.
> They didn't handle media very well this launch, what with the fumbled video release and then a retracted tweet.
This is just ridiculous nitpicking. SpaceX usually gives us camera views from inside the goddamn LOX tanks on the stages. 'Didn't handle media very well' my arse.