Apollo was a huge success because it fulfilled NASA's goal to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to the Earth before 1970.
Nothing else was required. If more things were done (11 other astronauts went there and traveled many miles), it's because there was a lot of inertia left...but things stopped anyway.

The shuttle program had a completely different task: neither the shuttle nor the space station were meant to have the current purpose (a few flights per year and nothing more); the purpose claimed under Nixon was to make space more affordabla, the shuttle was supposed to be the DC3 of spaceflight.
The purpose was not to build the shuttle, but to reduce the costs of sending humans to space.
Because Bush Jr shifted towards an Apollo style program rather than the original Shuttle objectives, can NASA (or rather the media and the public) accept this?
Leave space to a few brilliant persons or give access to more and more earthlings, that's what at stake.

This is where a paradox lies: space enthusiasts justify human Mars missions for colonization purposes. This means that access to space should be easy and cheap. But NASA nor the private sector are capable of this. The public doesn't want this either.
The public wants inspiration! A few motivated can do this, if they're funded all the way and the public and congress accept this (because it's a completely different strategy from the one that built the shuttles).

This is also why I'm in favor of flags and footprints, symbols, short term punctual flights.
We should be consistent with ourselves: We want space for the masses: we must stay in Low Earth Orbit and accept going nowhere until we find how to really reduce costs.
Or else we want to leave earth orbit for further away, then we keep space for an elite group and it's flags and footsteps like it was.