The only reason it exist it because it allies a bunch of different interest in NASA and its partner, those people who believe electric propulsion for Mars, space station people and the micro-gratify biology mafia.
Everybody know that the Gateway and the SLS/Orion are just political buyoffs for congress, so they can funnel money into an actually innovate and revolutionary solution, Starship.
The goal is to get Starship going and then do an end-run around congress and sell them on more Moon/Mars missions, finally killing all these terrible projects like Orion, SLS and Gateway. Since the development money for those projects will have largely been spent by then, the politically usefulness is mostly gone, so they will let them go in exchange for some bullshit new bullshit contracts.