In many ways it's really rather a shame that the Apollo program was successful. On the one hand it was unquestionably a civilization defining historic achievement for all mankind. On the other hand, the way it was achieved was not something we should want to emulate: the political horse trading, the management and development style, and the expense. LBJ used every political trick in the book to get Apollo running, and they worked. But we've been left with the political legacy of those tricks for the 4+ decades since then which have been massively distorting manned spaceflight policy and efforts without further Apollo scale achievements.

Unfortunately, the public generally only sees the good from Apollo and so tends to imagine that the methods of Apollo were also good, and should be emulated. They should not. There are better ways to run big, ambitious projects and better ways to get back to exploring worlds beyond Earth as well.