“you’d really really hope so .. otherwise it was a nice drive-by .. or an expensive date!”

Naw, it’s still worth something. No one else on Earth has gone to an asteroid or comet, landed, and come back intact. And the Japanese did it by spending, I think, considerably less than (e.g., NASA) would have spent to do the equivalent. Hayabusa will properly go down in the record books, no matter what!