I get the arguments for this idea. Why did USSR play along? They (claim they) had all the same transmissions and everything else we did, and they called us to congratulate us. I guess they could have just made a wild guess, but it seems more likely that they ... observed us land on the moon before calling us to congratulate us on landing on the moon.
Likewise we observed all their unmanned flights, and our records for all this agree.
Why would it require thousands of people ? Have you ever looked into it ?
NASA actually fucked up so much they literally couldn't keep it a secret, it couldn't be more obvious, at this point they could come out and tell you at their face that it was faked and you would never believe it
http://www.americanmoon.org/NASA/index.htm
Its actually so fucked up that you can see they never landed from every direction you ever approach the topic from, radiation, physics, engineering, sound, photography, heck if you look at Apollo 13, you can add medical field as well, no way any doctor will ever believe they never got hypothermia and survived it without a scratch, and the part where they eyeballed earth to get back to it even though being wrong by 0.1% would get them thousands of miles off course would piss off pretty much everyone with diploma.
You never looked into the moon landings did you ?