It's interesting to see that during Moon Race, in USSR there were 3 space design teams - Korolev's (later Mishin), Chelomey's and Yangel's - competing for resources, while NASA established centralized planning with everybody doing parts of the common project (with lots of money of course). It seems that "capitalistic" approach in USSR lost to more "communistic", central planning approach in USA.
Sure, but start of the "race" was pretty much the reverse - factions in the USA fighting for who will be allowed to launch the first satellite, resulting in the Vanguard fiasco. They had to bring in Von Braun in the end to do it, starting the centralization.
And in the USSR Glushko also played along initially, designing R-7 engines that are in use till today basically. Only later he stopped and started demanding all future engines to be hypergolic, which didn't go well with Korolev, especially for crewed vehicles.
> Glushko... started demanding all future engines to be hypergolic
I think Glushko owns a big share of Soviet problems with the Moon.
On the other hand, at the time the leading idea in USSR was that hydrogen is a rather advanced fuel (which, by the way, Glushko also supported at a time), and given good existing engines, rocket designers wished to use proven fuels. In general, and to compete with hydrogen in particular, Isp was an important goal, so rocket designers set goals to engine designers - make rocket engines with good Isp. There was created a conflict between high Isp/high pressure engines - as required - and large thrust engines, as was needed for big, Moon rocket. Glushko had the opinion that they won't have enough time to create large thrust high Isp engines with kerosene, only with UDMH/NO2 . Kuznetsov could only create relatively low thrust (1500 kN) high Isp kerosene engines, and those were late.
If Glushko tried, those engines could possibly work. At least Glushko experience with large thrust chamber of RD-270 helped later with large thrust 4-chamber kerosene RD-170.
