IR is profoundly more interesting, precisely because it is able to penetrate all sorts of media, most especially interstellar dust and gasses, allowing JWST (and others) to see stars that can't be seen by their visible light.
Regarding our atmosphere filtering IR: do you feel the heat of the sun when it shines on you? That's light. Infrared.
Edit: Additional point of fact: our atmosphere interferes with light by scattering it away from its angle of incidence. Light with a longer wavelength is able to get through without scattering (IR, red, orange, yellow, etc) light with a shorter wavelength (blue) is more likely to collide with a molecule of something on the way in, and it gets bounced around so frantically that all those blue light waves seem to kind of pile up and come from everywhere. No, our atmosphere's light transmission woes are much more deleterious to the smaller wavelengths of light than to IR.
Edit: source http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/cosmic_classroom/ir_tutor...