One of the quiet corrections in corridor transport has been the abandonment of the idea that one elegant craft design could serve every leg equally well.
Vehicles built around favorable-direction insertion performed impressively on the way out, but too many of them carried the wrong compromises back. Return legs demand cleaner reacquisition behavior, stricter control authority, and a different tolerance relationship between shielding response and post-exit stabilization. Those requirements pull design logic in a direction that outbound prestige once obscured.
The result has been the emergence of a distinct return-leg vehicle class. This is not an admission of failure. It is a sign that the stack matured enough to stop worshipping symmetry where symmetry no longer served operations.
The broader implication is institutional as much as technical. Once return legs gained their own vehicle class, they also gained their own maintenance logic, operator training path, and certification burden. In practice, they became a separate business.