You have to think of the moon landings in the context of a space race. John F. Kennedy challenged the country to land on the men on the moon "before this decade is out." It's a tribute to JFK's charisma that the project survived through the upheavals, wars, and social unrest of the 1960s.
Most of the effort back then centered on getting the astronauts to the moon and back. Comparatively little thought went into what they will actually do when they got there, other than taking pictures and collecting samples. All of the astronauts who went to the Moon, except for Harrison Schmitt were test pilots; and even Schmitt was bumped up from Apollo 18 when that mission was canceled.
To establish manned outposts on the moon required technology that didn't exists in the late 1960s. To live in space or on the moon for weeks or months you need large habitable structures. In 1969 we didn't have any experience with the large habitable space structures. The Soviet Salyut and Mir and American Skylab space stations were still years in the future.
To land the habitat on the Moon you would need a whole new Lunar Landing Module. The one the astronauts used for the lunar landings had barely enough power for the task. To save weight the designers omitted the seats for the crew, so the astronauts stood all the way down to the moon, and back up to the orbit. The walls were made of several layers of Mylar. On the later missions, NASA even reduced the number of Band-aids in the First Aid kit to save a few grams of up-mass from the moon.
For every kilo of mass you get to the moon the mass of your launch vehicle goes up by several hundred or even thousands kilos. While Saturn V was the most powerful booster the US built up to that time, it stills wasn't big enough to launch the Lunar habitat modules. Another round of R&D would have been needed to develop all these technologies.
I think that maybe if the it wasn't a race to the Moon, but a slow, steady progress, we would have gotten to the Moon, in the 1985-1990 time frame, but with enough technology to establish outposts there. Initially these would have been missions like those of Apollo, then around 1997 a Lunar outpost would have been established, initially it would have been manned by visiting crews, but by now we could have had a permanently manned station much like we have the International Space Station.