The space shuttle was an interesting thing but ultimately was a patchwork of politically motivated parts that in hindsight wasn't that successful of a space program. Artemis having to build on some of this just carried forward the same problems.

What makes me sad about this is that roughly 50% of the population was not alive the last time people stepped on the moon. I count myself among those I missed it by one year. Although I would not have remembered it at the time. Even at the time of the shuttle NASA should have been working to test interesting and non-financially viable technologies to release into the commercial market. Now launching rockets into space is fully a commercial endeavor. I think there's still a great role for NASA. Because there are some plausible technologies that will never be financially viable to research and develop without them. Let NASA partner with some of these places but develop things like aerospike engines and other technologies that have promise but are too far away from a commercial realization to be viable at this point.

I want to see people go to the moon again. Artemis was a big waste of money but I wanted it to send people back to the moon even if it was just to remind people that as a nation and as a world we should aspire to great and impossible things. That we should look up instead of looking down and inward all of the time. I wanted Artemis to prove out some of these technologies and then on the next trip it can go on a a SpaceX rocket or someone else's.

The mission plan used for Apollo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_orbit_rendezvous

has a bit of the character of a stunt, like going over Niagara falls in a barrel, but it is much easier than all the alternative plans. If you were a science fiction fan growing up in the 1980s you might have read editorials in Analog Science Fiction Magazine that suggested we were sold an inferior plan to get to the moon but anything better is a lot more difficult. Whether it is the star-crossed SLS-Orion complex, the comically bloated and tippy Starship-derived lander [1] or the plan to meet those up in a parking orbit and have astronaut climb out one hatch and into the other, there's no realistic plan at all.

[1] if you had a pair of those chopsticks and methane-oxygen fuel from ISRU boy it would be sweet but without that...