I find it implausible the the US military is so completely incompetent they didn't consider the best way to bring down the balloon and recover the payload.

Right. They clearly DID look at the options and decided the best one was to do what they did and bring it down with as little damage as possible over water where it could be recovered and examined in detail. And they LET it continue to fly over land, not because they were incompetent or because Biden is a weak president "in the pocket" of China, but because they KNEW they had disabled it's ability to send further information to China. All these idiot politicians who think their ignorant theorizing is better than the top military experts are just playing politics.

I'm also tired of hearing various talking heads say that this was clearly a brazen thing for China to do and then being mystified about why. The obvious alternative is that China (i.e., some hapless and now jobless technician or official) made a grave MISTAKE in letting the airship descend so low and be so easily detected from the ground. But I would still be interested in knowing how many such surveillance airships fly over the U.S. every month at whatever height. Just how easy (or not) are they to track compared to airplanes and satellites?