They’ve already shown they can replace all the tiles in a couple of days with removal and new install. No reason they couldn’t do even faster turn around with just re-install if that was needed.

And human rating is a NASA requirement they won’t have to worry about for a few years.

I really hope to see the evaporative cooling make a comeback but it seems unnecessary when it’s returning to earth right now.

It would also be interesting to see them do shallower dips into the atmosphere then pull back out and repeat. Like a skipping stone. Lots of expansion contraction, but might work better without tiles.

Bear in mind that a lot of what's happening to the tiles now is deliberate experiments to see how much weight they can shave off and how many failed tiles they can survive. Given that the vehicle is routinely surviving reentry at this point, it doesn't seem "hard" to make the tiles more robust by paying for it with added weight. The question is whether they'll have enough weight budget to pay for it? But at this point...probably? Not my area ofc.

Well at least for one part of that, 90-something percent of the launches don't need to be human rated.

All what tiles breaking and needing repair? There was remarkably little visible damage this time around compared with previous flights.

There's no materials science breakthrough needed -- the shuttle used ceramic tiles successfully its entire service life. What's needed is engineering work, and that's what SpaceX has been doing.

Small ships are less efficient, especially leaving the gravity well. Thats the whole point

They’ve already demonstrated they can replace all the tiles in a couple of days - even if they continue to have some fall off it won’t be an issue.