It would be good because there are many people who, roughly, refuse to believe their own eyes and keep moving goalposts, misrepresenting what they said or meant earlier, inventing additional conditions, changing their mind etc. If you would honestly believe that Starship can fly frequently when you see it flying frequently, you're already ahead of some.
I remember when people doubted that the full-flow staged combustion methalox engines could work... until SpaceX showed over a hundred of them working now.
Also catching a booster, also landing boosters at all, also achieving cost reduction via landings, also cheap enough phased arrays to make Starlink viable, also also also... SpaceX has a long history of proving doubters wrong.
I'd consider that cheating on the Gwynne side. It could be argued if chamber tilting mechanism is part of the engine - after all, it was added separately to NK-33 - but surely for Raptors it's considered an integral part, the fire test was then a test of chamber, not the engine :) . Though Gwynne had to answer positively, having little good choice.
The outer ring of engines on Superheavy do not tilt. They're rigidly mounted and exclude even the engine start hardware which is contained in the launch mount, further reducing weight. And they're only used during liftoff, not for boostback or landing.
Raptor is non-functional without tilting. That is, it's possible to build rocket where all Raptors are fixed, but that defeats some ideas of Raptors. And I haven't seen tilt mechanisms considered parts of the rocket.
So, while engines without tilting have been used - e.g. NK-15 - Raptors aren't from that category.
Raptor is used in a non-tilting configuration on both the booster and ship. You could certainly design a rocket to get to space with only non-tilting raptors, if you wanted. It would be silly to consider it incomplete without tilt, even if Starship does have some tilting ones too. Consider it two variants if you like, both complete on their own.
Differential thrust has been used to steer rockets for decades, and raptor has the sort of deep throttling capability required for it. Tilting is absolutely not required for anything but landing.
Yeah - you would still need roll-control, but given there are huge potato smashers already bolted on, it should not be an issue while in enough atmosphere. ;-)
