Well to be fair Nasa isn't nearly as good as it once was. The quality of engineer during the Apollo era was far better and more like what can be found at Spacex
Their explorer robotics are interesting, something I would be proud to work on; but a pretty different nitch.
So NASA is not drawing from the best people anymore.
NASA doesn't develop or build lots of technology that has become mature enough that private industry can take it on and NASA can focus on the past-the-bleeding-edge stuff.
Reality? Outside of JPL the talent level at Nasa is frankly very poor. You really want to claim that the current version of Nasa could pull off the Apollo program today?