This profile is hentai-free, looking for it? Leave. 
In terms of other planets it really doesn’t make any sense outside of pure scientific exploration (frankly it’s a good thing that it doesn’t make economic sense) and for the strategy I described the moon is a better candidate anyways, for the reasons mentioned. That’s what the Chinese moon missions have been investigating at least.
Personally I always thought the prospect of colonizing Mercury in a non-earth-like way at our current technology level made more sense (if not financial sense)- it could be done in subsurface caverns, harvest energy from the surface, ice is present inside permanently shadowed craters. Water is constantly being created from solar wind blasting the surface (sputtering creates water vapor when solar wind hits oxide-laden rocks. ).
The real problem? While the average distance between Earth and Mercury is only 48million km, around a third the distance to Mars (140 million km), the orbital speed is 47.87 km/s per second compared to Earth’s 29.78km/s, and Mars 24.08km/s. The transits could potentially be relatively short, but still end up consuming as many resources in the end. Mercury is also considerably less mass- while Mars and its gravity is 1/10th earths, Mercury is half that, which could have pretty bad long-term consequences for colonists.
how dare we be obnoxious to the virulent homophobes and transphobes that have been coming out of the woodwork
Considering the toll long-term low gravity takes on people it’s almost certain that’s going to be the case. Having human habitats there is a lot of unnecessary complexity, but maintaining healthy humans in those conditions is categorically worse.