"The shuttle remains an experimental vehicle" - the shuttle is a
dangerously unsafe, horrendously expensive and unsustainable vehicle.
If we had an alternative, we would use it tomorrow, but we don't
because we mortgaged everything on the Shuttle and ISS. Maybe I can
obfuscate for long enough for a new space "plane" (oddly wingless and
capsule-like) to materialise from the same syatem that lost hundreds
of billions of dollars in X-planes that never got close to getting off
the ground.

First, your figure of hundreds of billions blown on X-planes is bullshit. The number is actually more like $5 billioin. No need to overstate how badly NASA has screwed up. The actual facts are damning enough.

I do expect the Shuttle to fly again, if for no other reason than we still have 3 of them and no replacement will be available for several years. The proposed OSP is yet another NASA boondoggle ($2.2 billion for DESIGN STUDIES, my ass!). Like virtually every other big-budget NASA project over the past 30 years, it too will probably be late, over budget, and will perform well below initial estimates.