For me, as interested as I was in space sciences, I hadn't paid particular attention to Apollo. I was of the generation that thought of it as a stepping stone and my dreams were full of...well, mostly habitats, with their lovingly depicted suburbia slash industrial parks lining the inside of improbably sized cylinders and toroids.
So I was exposed to the hoax from the hoax side. It was...unconvincing. They made statements which were clearly contrary to basic geometry and optics, exposed clear and obvious pareidolia...plus the general presentation was mawkish. Then I hit the first skeptic site and the explanations were so well-formed they convinced almost by the sheer strength of their understanding of the material and ability to speak about it clearly and precisely.
I am with those that say the hoax belief starts with a propensity. The typical arc of the hoax believer seems to be to run into something --despite their narratives to the contrary, often demonstrably from a secondary source.
The difference being, when that first claim is thrown into question, they don't open up the question to ask if perhaps there wasn't a hoax after all. Instead they quickly grasp for other, stronger supports of what they've decided on without prior evidence.
For me, the big impact was not in the minutia, but in the larger picture. On a photo-by-photo basis you can quibble forever, and, yes, I did entertain thoughts that a hoax might have been possible. Until I took a step back and thought about the program itself. It isn't a couple guys in a spacecraft somewhere remote that brought a couple pictures back.
It was a massive public program, seated firmly in an ongoing history of the space sciences and aeronautical engineering. Every bit of behavior of materials or thermodynamics or whatever isn't some unique thing that only happened once out of sight of most of humanity; it is something analogous to behaviors experienced daily in thousands of industries, and linked by robust and quantified physical understanding to basic properties that are at the root of everything we understand and can do.
It isn't too much to say that if the thermodynamics claims of the hoax believers were correct, I wouldn't have been able to do some of the things I have personally done with hot metals. You can't draw some bright line between the physics happening on the Moon and the physics happening in your kitchen. The only thing you can do is fail to understand the underlying physics...and that is something the hoax believers demonstrate daily.
One can make similar points about the way the project was organized funded vetted inspected and reported on, or how the activities of the spacecraft were observed. In fact, I can not think of a single aspect of Apollo (at least, not one that has received focus from the hoax believers) that doesn't fall into the trap of requiring ten thousand people (and all the literature they produce) in some completely different field to be either lying, incompetent, or both.
