It's possible to plan for multiple eventualities. They may have pushed it to its limits (or beyond) and decided the best destination based on how it handled it
One of the commentators said (roughly) "they can make another rocket real quick, but if they blow their one pad up then they are hosed for a long time."
I like SpaceX as much as the next nerd but that's not "intentionally crashing the booster" it's "doing the only other type of landing you can when you abort the first plan of landing it successfully". I'm sure they got useful data out of it (it's better than "booster blows up in mid air") but this is squarely in "2nd attempt to land with chopsticks wasn't as ready as they hoped" bucket, not "132nd attempt to land the booster was intentionally destroying it to see how much farther they could be pushing it" as was originally implied with the wording and prior example.
Oh, sure, I didn't want to make any comment on what they were actually doing or trying to accomplish. Only that the hypothetical we were talking about would have been consistent.
There's a lot of middle ground here. I suspect what's most accurate is "let's push the booster out of envelope a bit, if we get really nice numbers we'll go for the chopsticks landing, otherwise it's into the drink".
In other words, they were optimistic enough to think that another upright landing was within the realm of possibility, while also deliberately doing things which made that outcome less likely, to get the data they need.
If that's true, I wouldn't characterize it as a second attempt at a chopstick land, that would just be a stretch goal. Who knows if it is, but it's consistent with how SpaceX operates.
No, but I'm neither omniscient nor able to see into the future. It's not clear to me that the sentence you're referring to had been posted 18 hours ago, and in any case, I hadn't seen it.
