I strongly suspect they've given the matter orders of magnitude more engineer-hours of consideration than you have. Yes, they have many other things to consider as well; that's why they have a lot of engineers.
I think for some questions you don't need to measure who spent more time to determine who's more correct. I also think that SpaceX realized they'd need to give many more efforts to develop this particular superior technology - I agree that this could be expensive and would take time. Maybe the Starship plans also affected their decision.
