Maybe the implementation needs to be more efficient, but I feel that Artemis, in principle, is a worthwhile endeavor. Not just for the United States, but for humanity. I would be proud to work on it.
Even in the absence of Starship it is actually holding back the space program.
Artemis a horrible architecture, its an architecture developed that was FORCED TO use existing SLS/Orion and Gateway programs.
Free from constraints a very different architecture would have developed.
So we're spending billions on this giant Welfare Check to certain congressional districts and aerospace contractors. If we cancelled SLS, we could do a lot of other exciting things with that money.
I believe that space exploration is an incredibly important national priority, even if only as a means of maintaining our space-related military capabilities. Anyone who believes the US can abandon space travel and still be secure against present and future global threats is just a goddamn clown.
But generally we shouldn't pay $2 for a bullet that we could buy elsewhere for $1. We could buy a lot more bullets if we bothered to try to contain our unit costs.