You're forgetting that we already sent landers to the Moon before we sent people. We didn't get much out of them. We just didn't have the technology, and the public wasn't going to be excited by a campaign that went like this: "it's too dangerous and expensive to send people to the Moon, so we're going to invest a ton of money into robotics technology so we can send robots there in 40 years!" A mandate to put robots there any faster wouldn't have worked; we just didn't have the technology. We developed a lot of our current computing technology IN the Apollo program itself, so the reason our computer-driven automation is so good these days is because we did send people to the Moon, instead of waiting and hoping for technology to improve.