I think the US was being a bit more practical than the Soviets. The R-7 certainly set the stage for legendary accomplishments, but it's operational deployment as a weapon system was limited to four pads of the type you still see at Baikonur today. The US wanted to avoid that kind of costly, exposed basing. The Soviets knew it was a crappy weapon and moved quickly to field the infinitely more practical SS-7 and SS-8 ICBMs (though the latter suffered from use of LOX).

Your narrative also omits the fact the R-7 has, in fact, evolved significantly over the years. We think of the design as static, but this chart shows the Soviets/Russians never stopped tweaking the engines for more performance: http://www.b14643.de/Spacerockets/S...nes/engines.htm

Finally, don't forget the Soviets had at least two "Navaho" equivalents under development as a hedge against R-7 failure or a perceived US advantage from Navaho - the Burya (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burya) and Buran (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS-40_Buran).

If GH thinks the test version of Navaho in Florida is absurd, then the planned G-38 operational version (bigger, even more difficult to handle) is truly outrageous!