Launching only 26 Starlink v3 satellites is a disappointingly small number. That's about ~52t or half the block 3 advertised payload capacity of 100t. Elon said on the Q3 earnings call that flight 14 carrying 26 V3 Starlinks was only about half loaded, so apparently the ship can launch twice as many.

I'm curious why they don't fully load it, I can speculate:

0) starship is still in testing, they don't want to change too many variables from flight 14 and add 50t of payload.

1) lower payload gives them more options in engine-out situations. On flight 14, both booster and ship had engines fail.

2) derisking for ship failure, each Starlink sat costs ~$1.2m, and losing $30m of satellites hits less hard than $60m if orbital insertion fails.

3) the dispenser installed on ship 42 only fits 26 sats, and increasing this would require a hardware modification and possible delays.

4) Starlink v3 manufacturing is delayed and they don't have enough units, which I find doubtful given Starship is years late and they should have a backlog of v3s waiting to launch.

5) block 3 has worse performance than expected and can't reliably deliver 100t to orbit. Recent comments that raptor 3 can only reliably deliver 230t of thrust instead of 280t support this. I speculate SpaceX is running raptor 3 >230t on booster ascent, which is why we keep seeing engines failing. This should be resolved by block 4 or 5 with raptor 4.