You're missing that a man with a shovel can find out in a day what a robotic probe cannot find out in a year, unless you're talking serious AI.
Which btw. can see better, further, and in a lot more spectra than the human eyes. Oh, and they can record what they see, and send it back for thousands of pairs of human eyes to examine back home on earth, where the users of said eyes are not constantly in danger of dying to explosive decompression, being frozen to death, or killed by space radiation or microabrasive silica dust.
And the best part? I don't have to waste tons of payload capacity on food, water, air and toilet paper, just to keep the cameras running!
IMHO, we should WANT TO waste tons and tons and tons on payload capacity of food, water, air, and toilet paper, to establish a permanent, viable, and most importantly independent colony on Mars.
At our stage, having that come from the private sector versus public sector makes more sense. Similar to how the New World was colonized (minus/following the annihilation of ancient cultures), governments explored but private companies promised the reward settled.
People will die. Inevitably. Cannot be stopped. But we should grow and expand as a species. Intelligence and comprehension of beauty are unique and wonderful things, in my opinion worth preserving across several planets, solar systems, and I hope galaxies.
These eyes, and the attached brains, can safely study the images that the aformentioned cameras send back to earth, and spend their valueable brainpower developing ever new and better robots instead of worrying about unpleasantries like explosive decompression.
> governments explored but private companies promised the reward settled.
The problem is, there is no reward to be had on Mars. Zero. Zilch. Nothing. The red planet has nothing to offer that isn't already available in abundance here on Earth. What there is an abundence of on Mars, is cosmic radiation, toxic perchlorate salts, microabrasive powdered regolith, planet-wide dust storms, and many many many ways for would be settlers to perish.
> But we should grow and expand as a species.
Absolutely. The thing is, trying and likely failing to somehow establish a colony on a dead, irradiated, freeze-dried wasteland isn't exactly going to help us much in that regard.
If there was significant uncertainty in what resources needed to be deployed to where then I could see a benefit to having an onboard team of humans who could assemble workers or payloads on the fly from orbit. However this would be a big shift from current mindset of designing robots for exact problem/solutions with precise payloads to instead having an excess of resources on board.
If the perspective shifted to "we're colonizing Mars so every ounce of metal in orbit will get used at some point" this is less of a concern.
If I send a probe, I can pack the entire payload with scientific instruments. If I send a man with a shovel, I have to pack food, water, air, habitats, spacesuits, and other tidbits instead, just to keep the man with the shovel alive (for a time).