Yeah, gravity sucks, but I find a trip to Mars far more interesting than one to an asteroid, E.g. the geology, water resources, valles marineris, the potential for life, colonization. Why not be obsessed?
Robots can tell a lot, but not everything. Exploring is not only knowing what's there, but actually experiencing it in human terms. The richness of the reports from astronauts on the Moon cannot be approached by what a robot can tell you. Also, a robot can only answer the questions it was designed to answer and, thus, it embodies, in its own construction, a series of assumptions about its target environment that may be completely off.
Humans are an extremely valuable resource.
And yeah a trip to Mars would be way more interesting, and spectacular, but if we want to get to mars and stay on Mars, rather than what Apollo did by getting to the Moon and then saying ta-ta for 40 years, then building an incremental and sustainable interplanetary presence is far more important.
I'm not sure what the RoI on the moonshot has been factoring in all the stuff like tech industry stimulus and so on, but I imagine that the RoI on an asteroid settlement and mining plan would be way higher than RoI on a Mars-shot. Probably to the point where the asteroid program could fund the Mars-shot by itself.
I'm not an expert, but I'm fairly certain that the most expensive part of our current program is just getting shit into orbit.
Clearly, they were just photoshopped in.