The vehicle will eventually land on its own.
The inverted pendulum problem is the very first one that every Controls engineer has to solve and landing Falcon is just that.
The recent attempt showed lack of control authority in the contingency case. That can and will be remedied.
Are there other ways to go for reusability? Millions. A lot have been tried (um, Shuttle) and walked away from. The mass capability loss to carry the fly back stuff (fuel for landing a stage, wings for fly back, chutes n’ stuff for capture/recover etc) usually is too big of a penalty to pay and then you have to overhaul the equipment to flight qualification levels.
Good luck with that. In the end, you find yourself spending about as much as if you just dumped it into the Atlantic.
Agreed.
I think they would be better off if the dropped the landing a pencil idea and go with the tried and true glide landing. Then they could concentrate on cutting turn around time and costs.
After all, for earth landing and launch, turnaround time and cost is their primary problem.