I think that this new flight plan tasks seem like a good way to gain more data to rapidly improve the two vehicles, given their current states of development.
However, adding more tasks that have never been attempted before is creating a high probability that some of them will fail. That doesn't seem to bother SpaceX, and I don't think it should.
But, it does seem to be a problem with the FAA culture, which seems to be more along the lines of everything must go exactly as planned and be successful or it requires the government to "review" the "causes" of the "failures".
I think that these FAA reviews need to be limited to unforeseen events that could cause unforeseen safety issues. There seems to be a significant difference between Musk's prelaunch admission that the first test flight might blow up on the ground and FAA being concerned that it was intentionally blown up well down the test range without getting out of bounds. I do agree that the FAA needed to review the lag in the response to the signal to detonate the safety explosive charge in the first flight. But, why the first flight needed to be terminated really doesn't seem like it should be FAAs issue for a test flight where failure at some point is known to have a high probability, going in.
The second flight did not seem to produce anything that the FAA really needed to review for safety reasons, so far as I have heard.
Regarding the plan for Starship to do a belly-flop landing in the Indian Ocean, instead of a simulated soft landing, I am wondering if the concern about potential salvage by China has anything to do with the chosen impact velocity.