Given how much the EU pissed away on a useless airplane that did not lead to any future orders beyond the initial set I would not exactly say that the EU 'won' this competition. The only way to win this game was not to play and earlier you bailed out on consumer SST the better off the end result.
The European aerospace industry absolutely won it. Concorde established anglo-french cooperation, known today as Airbus. Many innovative features (such as electric flight controls) introduced in Concorde were further developed in the following Airbus A300 and reached their full potential in A320, which is the highest-selling airliner in the world and has exceptional safety record.
A300 in particular was so ahead of its time that American airlines saw it as being too good to be true. An airliner much safer, efficient and reliable than any counterpart couldn't get a single sale for years until Airbus gave a few to Eastern Airlines for free (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ln-ffJM9sJc).
That is a nice story to tell yourself, but it is not actually what happened. Concorde was more about tying the UK into the European Economic Community and the future EU. The Aerospatiale/BAC partnership that developed the Concorde existed in parallel to Airbus and it was only much later that Airbus took over a lot of the operational maintenance of Concorde when it acquired Aerospatiale entirely in 2000.
Concorde was not an Airbus aircraft. Tech developed for Concorde was not the same fly-by-wire that ended up in the A300 line. The A300 line is very good, but would have (probably) existed without Concorde and the money pissed away on Concorde by Aerospatiale and BAC did nothing for either company other than weaken them and lead to BAC disappearing into BAE. (BAE, the weakened Aerospatiale and what was left of Messerschmidt previously had been pushed by their respective governments to join into Airbus.)
When BAC still existed as an independent company in the late 60s it lobbied the UK government to not support the A300 program and instead tried to push its own competing civilian airliner. Maybe if Concorde was not such a failure then Aerospatiale might have been able to continue on its own and BAC would not have been forced to be acquired by BAE and become a part of the Airbus group. In this imagined reality both would have continued as national aerospace champions in civilian planes in addition to their military work, but we will never know.
I think you are the one telling stories to yourself. According to you, Concorde was created to tie the UK to the EEC, which UK was not part of. May I remind you that the EEC membership was proposed to the UK and they flatly refused. Later when they tried to join, France denied their membership up until 1973. Concorde first flew in 1969.
Parent is correct, Concorde was a first step towards Airbus. European governments knew that there was too many aircraft manufacturers and they saw the need for mergers. France and UK are the leading europeans aircraft manufacturers, that made sense to start with a franco british venture.
Many of the Concorde staff later worked for Airbus, like Henri Ziegler, and refined the concorde technology.
Sonic boom noise/damage is a very real thing, and the engines on Concord were VERY loud compared to modern high bypass turbofans even when not operating supersonic. Flying the Concord subsonically doesn't make much sense; the range was tailored to cross the Atlantic at supersonic speeds (4,400 mi range. 3,600 mi trip. Don't forget that it needs to reserve 30 minutes of fuel, in addition to the nearest alternate). If you slow it down over land it gets less efficient so you really can't get too much farther than the coasts unless you stop to refuel. But then you've just got a low capacity, loud, expensive to operate subsonic plane.
The reality is that the Concord was very good at one thing, getting across the North Atlantic at speed. But it was much worse for almost anything else since it lacked the range for longer crossings (it had about half the range of a 747), and wasn't a good option for subsonic overland travel, and consumed more fuel per passenger per mile.
