But at what cost? It's a paradox, a conundrum.
No, it's a dilemma.
You can design the vehicle so that most or every stage is capable of being recovered and (after extensive refurbishment) re-used, but that has two costs: a) such a vehicle wouldn't be able to carry as much payload; b) refurbishment is expensive.
The alternative (which was the paradigm up to the Space Shuttle) is to re-use nothing, thus maximizing the amount of payload you can orbit per unit of fuel.
I'm betting that the answer is to be found in a variant of "a)": Constructing hybrid vehicles with a first stage consisting of a piloted horizontally-launched aircraft (eventually hypersonic) which can lob a more rocket-like second stage into orbit before returning to land on an airstrip.
This is the strategy currently being pursued by Orbital ATK.
Regards,