It reminds me a bit of the competition between the Manned Manoeuvring Unit and the Remote Manipulator System: the MMU was sexier, dashing made the astronaut totally free from anything, but eventually, the RMS won because it allowed the astronauts to work with their gloved hands while having their feet well anchored.

The Shuttle is a spacecraft that's huge, reusable, carrying payloads and many astronauts (non professionnals, scientists, foreigners), returning smoothly to Earth, but facing a spacecraft that is ugly, small, surmounted by an escape tower, can spend months in space and is very reliable, the Shuttle showed how much it's fragile and dangerous and the capsule prevailed...

The judge being the space station: it can welcome small, ugly, or huge , sexy or (non)reusable spacecrafts, it can become a hotel or a garage or a service station or a science laboratory or a political tool...it's big merit is to be there, now, and a destination.
It goes round and round, nowhere? Not quite, it's in the first reachable
place in space where things and people can stay for a while; it's in vacuum, in space , in weightlessness, and with a great view of home.

We shouldn't forget how much we got frustrated when Skylab went down, how much we felt a space station was needed (next logical step in space), how much it was going to cost if the US did it alone.

But, the interesting thing could be: the ESA ATV, the Kliper could keep it active without NASA's contribution...But wouldn't that be frustrating to see others taking advantage of and using devices and equipment already there and paid by US tax dollars and no american being there?

Raoul