How would you judge what you could learn being close to a place for extended, uninterrupted periods of time? How would you get incentivised to invent something out of this world because you're in another one?

Unique experiences are something which you can't have otherwise. So you're missing them if you're not close. Why to have such a disadvantage, maybe not for everything, but for something?

I just wonder if the scale of effort to colonize and support humans really provides a net benefit considering how successful remote programs have been.

There's so much you don't need to do if you're not sending humans.

The first astronauts will explore more of Mars in their first few days than rovers have done in 50 years.

Mars likely had life and we won’t be really sure of what kind and it’s history until we get boots on the ground. Robots are great for very limited tasks, but take decades and billions to design, build and deliver to do what a scientist can do in an afternoon. Right now we have one rover that bern failing to dig a hole fir nearly two years.

Considering the volume of resources expended to get people to mars and host them there and return them... I'm not sure that it is a fair comparison.

The volume of resources for a NASA style plan is indeed mind boggling.

But the Mars DIRECT and SpaceX plans are more than an order of magnitude cheaper and easier. The SpaceX plan it’s hundreds of explorers on Mars for less than $10B.

Yeah no doubt they can save money but no getting around the sheer amount of mass you need to move to maintain humans.