I am not sure I would call not building two space stations for the purposes of the program crazy. Remember, that the Apollo program was initiated before anyone had performed an orbital rendezvous of any kind. For quite some time the preferred (by most) approach to the moon landing was direct ascent [0], as rendezvousing seemed just too scary.

The approach of sending a large, but modular spacecraft all the way to the moon also proved to have the ability survive some rather interesting failure modes [1] so maybe it was not so crazy after all?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_ascent [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13#Accident