Nasa itself did see the landing as "The big risk", there was much discussion with Apollo 10 as to whether having got all the way to the moon, if they should actually take the final step, and comit to a landing, but the decision was made to treat that purely as a rehersal and run through all the preparation and docking steps to test systems  for docking, seperate orbiting of modules etc.

They were well aware that the surface was the one point from where recovery was completely impossible to quote Alan Shepard

Alan Shepard Quotes

I think all of us certainly believed the statistics which said that probably 88% chance of mission success and maybe 96% chance of survival. And we were willing to take those odds.

So it wasnt unreasonable to be planning for the worst case.

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.