I agree.
I originally meant to include Mir along with the Apollo example, but as you point out, Mir's value was primarily to manned exploration issues, not to any other scientific or industrial application. Mir was indeed a success, it's crew managed to deal with events no robot could handle, breakdowns, collisions, even a fire! They also demonstrated that human versatility, determination and heroism is what all exploration is about. I was sad to see it shut down, I had hoped it could be maintained in some sort of maintenance mode, as backup or complement to ISS, but I suppose the benefits of redundancy were trumped by the drawbacks of duplicated effort.