As daft as flinging the car up is, I suppose the idea is to get people 'interested'. It was a test of a vehicle that you can't really try out gently round an empty car park and maybe a 'serious' payload wasn't worth the risk?
We have come to rely on earth-orbit satellites for a lot of daily life, not just GPS and re-runs of old TV programmes.
The fact that stuff has become commonplace and a bit boring is often a sign of great progress. Airliners still fly at much the same speeds as they did fifty/sixty years ago, but they don't kill us as often and they're a lot cheaper to use.
Landing a thing on a comet has to be counted as impressive, surely?
The current Russian system for travel to the ISS hasn't killed anybody for a very long time.
Having said that, I would have been impressed if we had stuck a radio telescope on the far side of the Moon, shielded from all the fizz down here.