We can develop all sorts of technology without going to the moon. The most popular item on the planet (no not sex), the iPhone, was commercially developed without ANY government support, and in fact with the government scooping up a fair wad of Apple's profits and squandering them on idiotic things like Soylandra.
It would probably also be a good jumping off point to explore other planets, less gravity and all that
Yes, but you still have to get there and you incur the double gravitational penalty of soft landing on the moon and then taking off again from it
we are ever to get to the next level of space exploration.
What do you consider the next level of space exploration? We've been to mars and it consists of rocks and dirt. We've been to Saturn and it consists of cold gas, and it's satellites consist of rocks, dirt, ice and dirty hydrocarbons. All of which we have here. Frankly there isn't anything in the solar system that's worth the cost of getting it. We have to make or break right here on this ball of dirt.
Granted, this won't happen in our lifetimes and probably won't for many more generations to come. But if we are ever to get to that point, we have to start taking baby steps. It took hundreds of years for the Europeans to start pushing ships across the ocean to North America but once that happened, things started to develop much more rapidly.