[bvw]

Apollo 13 was a success. The crew lived, the system showed itself to be robust. The Shuttle has ever been a fragile piece of crap, and deadly.

[Cincinatus]

You can't compare an experimental system like Apollo to an operational one like Shuttle. Apollo flew 11 times with people (15 if you also count Skylab and ASTP). The Shuttle has flown 123 times, with an aggregate time in space of over 1100 days. That "fragile piece of crap" has safely flown over 700 people to space and back.

Apollo as a flight system never had a launch abort, although it came very close to one (Apollo 12, struck by lightning on launch, was seconds away from an abort). If they had to use the Launch Escape Tower on Apollo, there was only a 50-50 chance of surviving such an abort.