One fascinating idea I haven't heard talked about is, if we ever are able to make super-strong carbon composites, they could be used on Venus for passive floating dragnets to scrape raw materials from the surface. They could float just enough to drag the surface from one end and be carried along by winds from the other, and then be passively triggered to float back to the upper atmosphere to be harvested.

Thanks to the extreme bouyancy of Venus, a small amount of compressed air could passively lift much more than it would on Earth, making Venus's bouyancy a secret super power. And you could design nets with creative combinations of hooks, one-way valves and so on to gather a payload as it passively drags the surface. And seaweed-style distribution of compressed air capsules could make it fault-tolerant even if ripped by the horrific winds of the middle atmosphere.

The temperature, torsion, and corrosion are as extreme as it gets, and it may not be realistic, and/or it may not be feasible to think such payloads could float through the hurricane force winds and be recoverable. But it has a tantalizing feeling of "holy heck this bouyancy super power might be useful" in the event we had material strong enough to do it. That would give a hypothetical Venus settlement access to iron, magnesium, aluminum, calcium, some titanium, and bunches of silicon dioxide.

Yeah, if you can't send robots to the surface to mine necessary minerals, don't bother building floating cities.