No one prior to Apollo predicted a bare lava surface on the Moon -- this was well known from the diffuse reflection of the sunlight off the Moon, which indicated a ground-up, powdery surface. The dynamics of soil formation by grinding up the surface rocks was accurately modeled and predicted by Gene Shoemaker (for whom the NEAR mission was named), in contra distinction to Gold's model.
Gold will not admit that he was wrong about the Moon and still believes the same silly story he believed before we went to the Moon with the Apollo missions. Other scientists who were wrong, like Harold Urey, admitted this fact after Apollo, to their everlasting credit. Gold, like the crank he is, refuses to admit error.
"What happened, to my great annoyance, was that the other side wanted to ridicule me before the landing by saying, We think it's all hard stuff but Gold thinks you're going to sink out of sight the moment you step onto the surface. It was completely a slander. As I had written, when I step out of a plane in Denver I'm stepping onto a mile of fine granular material - because it all washed out from the mountains - and I don't sink out of sight. I would not have worked on a camera to go to the moon if I had thought it was not going to work. But it was published that Gold says when they step off the ladder they will sink out of sight. And newspapermen, as you probably know, read other newspapers, and these things tend to propagate."
As far as the historical record of what others thought at the time are you saying this isn's true?:
"...actual accounts from that period tell a rather different story. Gene Shoemaker was quoted in an article in National Geographic (circa 1963) as saying that the surface was covered with cobbles (fist-sized chunks of rock). I still have a copy of the cover of the Houston telephone directory (circa 1964), which was a NASA publicity photo showing a spacesuited astronaut walking on the NASA geologists' best guess of the Lunar surface: volcanic ash consisting of centimeter-sized rocks. Following the Soviet Luna 9 landings, Gerard Kuiper, the preeminent planetary astronomer of his time, held a news conference in which he proclaimed that the surface was obviously volcanic aa lava, adding that this would "tear an astronaut's boots to shreds". Even after the unmanned Surveyor landings on the moon, the NASA geologists continued to insist that the regolith was course-grained."