Seeing a rocket land vertically goes against almost 70 years of what we "know" about rockets. Falcon 9 rockets landing on legs seem unnatural enough; now we have a rocket, the size of a 20-story building, landing on chopsticks.
There are lots of vertical-landing rockets ... in science fiction, and only before Sputnik in 1957. Once actual space programs came about and lots of engineers understood just how difficult landing a rocket is compared to launching it, they all went away. Fictional vehicles became more and more complex to make them "realistic" (that is, consistent with real spacecraft on the news), or just didn't bother with the details at all and went to quasi-magic technologies like in Star Wars and Star Trek.
SpaceX is taking us to the future by going with something from the past.
SpaceX landing and catching boosters is amazing, but landing rockets is not new: all the Apollo LMs, indeed everything ever landed on the Moon was done with "vertical-landing" rockets.
Not to rain too much on your harping, but the DC-X program did vertical landing 30 years ago.
Yes, and that was all the experimental program did. No humans on board, no payloads, no orbit, not even suborbital as they stayed close to the ground.
The Falcon 9 puts humans into orbit then turns around and lands not far from the launch tower. It's then brought in for maintenance and a few weeks later launching again - some of them have done 20 flights.
You’re comparing an experimental program that lasted 6 years with a company founded 22 years ago. How many payload flights did space-x do 6 years into its existence?