There are those who criticize just for the sake of making themselves look smarter. If you counter them they back off right away, but if you do not counter them, they just throw more criticism at you. That is their strategy in life.

Then there are those who enjoy a good fantasy such as that provided by space travel, but who don't have the ability to do the math. They simply hope that someone, somewhere, will figure out how to make it all happen. Meanwhile they dream bigger dreams. Like myself, I flunked out of university, and even though I can do a lot with math & physics, I don't know enough to figure out everything. For example, after 1.5 years of studying space technology on my own it appears to me that space colonization could be achieved using a rotating space elevator. However the powerplant needed is so massive that I don't yet know if going that route will actually be better than using plain rocketry to launch habitats.

People tend to prefer one thing over another, when a combination would work better. But when you can't do the math very well for either one, let alone find the cash need to do experiments, then one can hardly speculate as to how effective a hybrid system would work. Even if we had a crude system there would still be literally billions of things that could be incrementally improved to enhance performance. Are you familiar with "permutations"?

Life is a giant jigsaw puzzle with 10 E+300 pieces.