Putting the first people on the moon, the first people on any foreign celestial body, as a show of power during the cold war isn't what I'd consider "token".
Putting people on the moon today is a lot less substantive, and doing it with decades old technology makes it even less so.
I see the correlation you're trying to draw: "neither is of any practical use", but I think even that ignores the very deliberate effects the first space race had on the USSR.
It's worse than that - SLS siply can't do what it was supposed to on paper even after 10's of billions, resulting in the secondary boondoggle of the Lunar Gateway which will waste billions more and still fail to achieve lunar-relevant
SLS is a solution for the problem of the US needing a large launch vehicle. That's not the issue. The issue is that it's taken way more time and money than anticipated and hasn't shown good results.
Budget and schedule overruns are expected with any large project - it's just the nature of contracting. But there are limits, and SLS blew past them quite a while ago. I'm not sure how much of it is NASA's fault given how much congressional meddling has gone on, though.
That’s fair, it’s gone on so long that the problem it was solving for has evolved. Someone has to be strong enough to know when to cut the sunk cost and shift gears and that’s how I’m choosing to look at the current situation.
