< I appreciate that the truss is complex, with lots of fancy power and data infrastructure, but so is a major skyscraper, and most of the skyscrapers are cheaper and a bit bigger.

Come on Tom, you know better than that. In orbit structures can't be compared with earthbound structures.

Yes, I agree, ISS is costing more than it could have, but it never would have been built without all the politics and NASA laying the ground work. As you know politics is what brought all the ISS partners together so they would spend the majority of there money on a joint international space effort instead of on in house offensive military systems that we would have to counteract. We brought the politics on ourselves which led to ISS's galactic budget.

I guess I'm overly hyped by the complex ISS systems and the thought of what it's various scientific projects could accomplish.
SteveS