One big problem with the shuttle tiles is that they are exposed to the environment (and thus subject to dings and such) at all times. In the old rockets like Mercury thru Apollo, the backside of the capsule (which had to deal with reentry) was protected by the final stage until just before the reentry sequence began
The shuttle was badly designed from day one, with multiple inherent design flaws. The famous physicist Richard Feynman was appointed to the commision investigating the Challenger blowup. They wanted a whitewash, but he refused to go along, and published his own evaluation of the design flaws. A fuller discussion is in his autobiography "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman". The bottom line is that it seems that fatal flaws were glossed over in order to get the Shuttle built.
Didn’t they peg the “O Rings” as cause of the failure? That’s a joke.
“flaws . . . “
People and cargo do not belong on the same launch vehicle.