I'm not sure what point you're trying to make?

My comment (in support of NASA) was that an isolated test failure shouldn't be looked upon as a failure of their entire programme. Instead it's actually a signal of progress being made (however slow that progress may be).

There were plenty of isolated testing failures like this (some much worse) leading up to the moon landing.

It did go very well overall, but 3 astronauts died in testing (totally avoidable), several of the test-launches of the rockets didn't go to plan, and later Apollo missions had various incidents.

It was a pyrrhic success. It was so expensive it was a dead end.

Its actually wasn't. If you actually look at the cost involved. Putting all the funding into Shuttle simply made the Apollo architecture to expensive.

A much, much, much, much better strategy would have been to keep the Appollo hardware and evolve it. Plan for 1-2 Saturn V flights every year. Use the F1 engine on a smaller vehicle (like Saturn 1B) and use that vehicle as the work horse for both the military and NASA.

This would have allowed them to mass produce the engine, reuse the same pads. It would have given them much more capability compared to Shuttle and it would have been considerably cheaper.

It was bad engineering choices, not simply the budget. They cut the wrong things.

That wouldn't have been continuing Apollo; that would have been salvaging something from the effort. I do agree it (or something else, like Schnitt's MCD booster concept) would have been far better for the country, even if they wouldn't have gotten Nixon as many votes in California.