Agreed. Almost the whole of the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo programme can be considered a sequence of all-up tests, and certainly not testing only one thing at a time. It's most obvious on Apollo 7 through 11; i.e. 7 for orbit, navigate and re-entry; 8 for booster and lunar navigation; 9 & 10 for the LEM; then 11 for the whole shebang. Similar steps in capability being developed and tested for the first time can be seen right through the series.
The space shuttle for all of it's glamour put paid to the incremental development we're seeing again amongst SpaceX / Blue Origin / a dozen others. Some incredible tech went into getting the shuttle running, and then everything went on hold for best part of 2 if not 3 decades. Hell; Russia is still flying derivatives of the R7. Despite efforts to look for alternatives it's progress has been positively glacial.
I'm not one for commercialisation of every last problem, but it would certainly appear the strategy backed by deep pockets with nothing better to do is working for the space industry.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
