What Next:
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These have the advantage that they can hover in an actively controlled vertical attitude, as demonstrated in at least one Starship test flight, until there is no more horizontal motion."
..I'm sure that's part of the theory, and I know it's been demonstrated, but of course according to the IM CEO a day or two back the intention with Odysseus was to touch down with zero horizontal motion....
One reason the likes of Surveyor's landing gear was as wide rigged as it was was because at the early design stage nobody had much of a clue about lunar topography on a micro scale (that started to come with the late Ranger missions) , and with the onboard technology available at the time the amount of horizontal motion remaining on touchdown couldn't be guaranteed to be zero...so the gear was built to allow the thing to land on a sizeable slope with some residual horizontal motion.
I'm probably way wide of the mark here so please allow a bit of idle speculation but I wonder if some of the current thinking is that with all the modern super reliable "tech" there's no need expended weight on oversize undercarriage, "just in case", because the new technology gizmos will avoid boulders, avoid lateral motion, and avoid significant slopes.
and yet here we are with a modern vehicle over on it's side on a 12 degree incline.......
Edit to add....Just seen Scott Manley has now addressed the geometry issue: