Yeah, Mars has the downsides of a planet: gravity making things heavy and makes launches from the surface take a lot of energy, dust getting into/onto things it

Yeah, Mars has the downsides of a planet: gravity making things heavy and makes launches from the surface take a lot of energy, dust getting into/onto things it shouldn't, an atmosphere thick enough to be a problem when landing etc. But Mars also combines those with the downsides of space: no breathable atmosphere, no magnetic field, very little water or other life-sustaining resources etc. If we had the tech and infrastructure to colonize Mars, we could just colonize the solar system by building orbital rings and space stations. It would be much cheaper and easier. So much so that it is possible in our lifetime without requiring the currently unatanable technologies that are required to make Mars feasible. (e.g. terraforming) When you look at the cost/difficulty versus the benefit, colonizing the Moon first and then spreading to the asteroid belt makes way more sense. The only reason to go to Mars is that it is another planet and thus phsychologically closer to being a second Earth than any other location in our solar system. That is not to say that we shouldn't send humans there. Just that a permanent base really shouldn't be our priority when there are so many better places to colonize first.