More or less. Here's the thing, SpaceX is almost certainly going to demonstrate partial launch vehicle reusability within the next year. And they're going to make it look easy. What's more, for the most part it will be easy.

The damning bit is that what SpaceX ends up doing will be the sort of thing that could have been done back in the '80s or maybe even the '70s. But nobody had the right combination of pragmatism and vision to make it happen. But they could have, and there were bread crumbs all along the way.

So why didn't they? A lot of it ultimately comes down to a few factors. Group think and bureaucracy. And fads. Yup, fads. One problem that orbital aerospace has been constantly afflicted with is the coolness factor problem. When pushing new projects it can be difficult to do so unless there is some sort of coolness factor, some way in which the new project is demonstrably more advanced than previous generation efforts. This is anathema to actual progress because most progress comes from copying, perfecting, and incremental innovation. The coolness factor is how we ended up with Shuttle (so cool), and X-33/VentureStar (much, much cooler). But look at the Falcon 9, it's just a 2 stage LOX/Kerosene booster, they've been building those since the '50s/'60s, it's the definition of uncool. But what it lacks in coolness it more than makes up for in usefulness.

In terms of fads you can look to the Hydrogen rocket fad that still has a grip on a lot of engineers. LOX/LH2 undoubtedly has a very high Isp, and Isp is supremely important in the rocket equation. But it's not everything, and LH2 has a crapload of very serious downsides when it comes to using it in rocketry, many of which add significant cost to the system. The Hydrogen fad is why the Shuttle had SRBs (because the SSMEs couldn't generate enough thrust on their own to get off the pad) and thus is partially responsible for the Challenger disaster. It's also responsible for the Delta IV, which is an extremely expensive launcher.

But back to breadcrumbs. They were there. In the early '90s the DC-X program demonstrated vertical takeoff/vertical landing was a feasible technology, and it did so using LOX/LH2 even. But the program was largely ignored because NASA was too dumb to see the promise of a reusable stage, since it wasn't cool enough relative to the idea of an SSTO RLV (in the same year as the last flight of the DC-X NASA got the X-33 program rolling).

If NASA was just a little bit smarter and more practical it would have been easy to see the promise of the DC-X, easy to see the practicality of partial reusability, and easy to see the advantages of simpler launchers. But they didn't. Instead they pursued cool idea after cool idea, dumping around a billion dollars into X-33 alone. And when their overly ambitious cool ideas didn't pan out they ended up with nothing. And it was only through the comparative pragmatism of the defense department and the EELV program (which developed a couple boring 2-stage launchers) that the US had any reasonable launch capability whatsoever after the Shuttle program ended. Now it will be through the comparatively superior pragmatism (not to diminish the genius of SpaceX) that we'll end up with even greater launch capability and unprecedented reusability.