It's a 14-story tower made of aerospace alloys designed to be as light and strong as possible. Think of it as a very tall (and mostly empty) beer can with some mondo titanium outriggers on it and you ain't far off.
I can relate - having been at the full extension of a 60' cherrypicker I know what you mean. I don't know that they do this, but I could see putting the servos of the landing skids under feedback control such that "vertical" is actively maintained. As you don't have total control of the seas you're landing on, it'd be a software fix for a hardware problem. Thing of it is, the metallurgy of a 1st stage rocket shouldn't be radically different after a burn than it is before. You might be right - but I'd be tempted to fly it again to see if it breaks. Remember - they've got two or three that have fallen over and are unusable but from a fatigue standpoint are fundamentally intact. The interesting thing, to my mind, is that in order for the economics of reusable launch vehicles to make sense, demand has to go up by a factor of ten. Let's see what that brings...
That begs the question of how many people have a kick ass Idea or business plan, but cannot afford launch services? Iridium, for example, spent about 1/2 of the costs of the satellites to launch them, and had to engineer the satellites to work on Russian, French and the Atlas launchers before finalizing a deal to launch everything via SpaceX in the future. What if that total dropped to 1/4? Someone out there has an Idea. But that Idea is being thwarted by launch costs and waiting for a manifest to open up. The Europa Flyby Mission they are talking about, for those of you out there that want numbers, is expected to run 3-5 billion US dollars. Assume cost overruns, add a billion on that. Launch costs are $500 Million of that total, just to get the thing in space and the rocket they plan on using is not even built or tested yet, so double that launch cost.The interesting thing, to my mind, is that in order for the economics of reusable launch vehicles to make sense, demand has to go up by a factor of ten. Let's see what that brings...