> I’m not sure that we need men or women 11 km down except for media coverage. I’d rather see thousands of small/cheap fully autonomous sea floor landers taking benthic core samples worldwide than one giant expedition doing gimmicks to get media coverage.

Well, but men and women want to be there.

This last paragraph of yours is a mirror image of the same argument against manned space exploration - wouldn't it be better/easier/cheaper if it was all done by autonomous robots? The answers are also similar: we don't have the necessary tech, we likely won't have it without intermediate missions involving humans, even in robotic missions there will be a benefit of having humans near the mission site (in case of space: light lag), and media coverage is actually a good thing, because both fields are starved for funding.