Seems to me like Mars is probably the best colony world. Much fewer engineering problems, I think. And IIRC Martian soil consists primarily of iron ore. Plus way more water.
Teleop mining robots? That place kills our probes and I don't think they even have many moving parts. What about some kind of bucket chain?
Well, I never said that they seemed like a good idea to me. (It's personally hard to think of scenarios in which Venus-proof robots could be economical - unless the asteroids and other rocky planets/moons have all been tapped out, which is far-future enough that I don't care.) That's just what he seems to think.
I was wondering what people thought of this paper by Geoffrey Landis on colonising Venus. In it he suggests that cloud-top Venus is one of the most benign environments in the Solar System. Temperature and gravity are similar to Earth, there's some radiation shielding and useful resources, and aerostats filled only with breathable air would float at that height. I'm no expert so can't speak to how accurate it is, but it's certainly very thought-provoking for such a short paper.