Derek Lyons wrote:

Of course, there were no unmanned missions that had tried to do what
they did. (Sample gathering, high res photography in particular.) In
fact, serious surface science was *deferred* until Apollo and not even
attempted on Surveyor.

Or to put it simply; there is not a significant database of unmanned
lunar science to compare to the manned effort. Any claim like the one
quoted above is nothing but a strawman.

Even so, unmanned missions either found or could have found most
of the 'big' scientific results of Apollo. Surveyor determined that
the moon was differentiated, not primitive; orbital photography got
much of the stratigraphy down; unmanned sample return (like that Soviet
lander) would have gotten the oxygen isotope, volatile depletion,
and europium anomaly results.

Paul