I didn't find the people or relationship issues to detract from the Mars trilogy because the personalities interweaves with the politics, and the inescapability of personalities and relationships being factors in the close proximities necessary in almost all stages of colonising a planet.
Greg Egan, recommended on HN in any sci-fi related thread, seems idea-heavy from the little I've read so far.
(edit: reading down further I see I've been beaten to this recommendation)
The novel I want to write is a thoroughly depressing the-future-is-the-just-present-for-those-born-during-it exposition about the inescapability of human nature and how this means that any and all revolution is doomed to just change the people and not the structure and that whilst your fellow revolutionaries are your closest friends and allies now, in the unlikely chance that the revolution is successful, when it comes time to actually make decisions affecting reality, you'll find yourself in the company of strangers with familiar faces. Highlighting that in any future-state technological context this remains true.
but fiction can be worth it when its laying out ideas that are so new and so fresh that it is intrinsically valuable. but these grand visions dont involve people or relationships at their core, so making a book out of it can be difficult.
i think the next great sci-fi novel will be about mars. i feel like there are a lot of aspects of mars colonization that have not been picked up by the hive-mind yet. practical aspects of living there and moving things there. and generally applying the rules of today to that world. the arbitrage is in the fact that people usually paint the future with a utopian, optimistic brush but the same rules of economics and politics will apply on mars just as much as they do here. maybe that sounds like red mars but it would be different.