Does anyone get the point with Artemis? Because I really don‘t.

To my untrained eye the current outlook on the program looks like that rocket is right now only supposed to make two roundtrips along the moon — and then in that third „Starship HLS“ mission Artemis’ only job is to take up the astronauts to orbit: while Starship (notably designed to be human rated) will be doing all the heavy lifting of the mission.

In this context it all looks like a total sham, it would literally be cheaper and easier to send them up in another reusable Starship.

What other purpose does Artemis have except building the most expensive trip to orbit existing so NASA can say „hey, we did something about this moon mission too!“?