That's the only good answer of the thread. ArianeGroup is mainly the SLBM program of France and after that a way to maintain european know-how in rocket building and for nearly 20 years was the main space launch company in the world before Space-X. All those companies success and failures (be that Space-X or ArianeGroup) are linked to their political environment and how much money can be spent on their launch market. Space-X could use the technique of launching many and fail as much because they had the contracts to do it and years of tangential R&D by Nasa. The ecosystem explains everything and the relative intelligence of american or european engineers nearly nothing.
SpaceX launched three times and would have failed if their fourth launch hadn’t worked. They certainly never had the money to launch many times and fail.
