> Just because it looks cool is not a reason to do it.
I'm pretty certain that 'looks cool' has nothing to do with it.
SN10 had to be moved away from the assembly point because SN11, SN12, etc are close behind. They needed the space.
Why wasn't SN10 further away? SpaceX is moving fast, and moving these building-sized craft around is slow.
SpaceX has a many years of experience in landing rockets. Perhaps more directly, they have a lot of experience in failing to land rockets. To that end, they've use a kind of 'fail safe' methodology, where for most of the approach, the vehicle's trajectory is toward a safe, low-value spot.
For example, during the booster return of the CRS-16 mission in 2018, there was a problem, so the booster automatically didn't translate back toward its nominal landing pad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFdep0qCmYA In that case, the problem ended up not being severe enough to cause a crash.
Since switching to low-cost stainless steel, SpaceX design philosophy is to rapidly prototype using low-cost materials and assembly line like mass manufacturing ("the machine that builds the machine").
They expect to lose many rockets along the way. They only put 3 raptor engines in there because that's the expensive part.
This is in contrast to the SLS where they spend 5 years and billions of dollars designing and building one rocket that's make of break, with the second rocket launching people.
