Ceres isn't well-suited for long term human habitation due to extremely low gravity and a surface environment much more hostile than that of Mars. You'd either have to have a sizable rotating space station nearby or do everything with remotely controlled and/or autonomous robots, and in the case of the latter you'd be much better building the robots and/or space station on Mars and launching from there than trying to get all of that out of Earth's gravity well.

I took for granted that you would not use surface. The rotating station can be built inside a cave. The main advantage over orbiting is mining.

In other words, I believe that Mars' appeal is a mirage. Musk and company are seeing it as another Earth where people can live like here, with a little terraforming.

I think it would be much more difficult. Of course I could be wrong, or I could be right but, even then, Musk could be modern Columbus.

In the Expanse series they solved Ceres' gravitation issue by speeding up rotation and walking on "the being" of their tunnels.