One way to beat the odds on Mars is to do things in the good times, and wait out the bad.

The average rate of erosion etc is frighteningly slow, but this can be done either by uniformitarian slow conditions or by variable conditions, where over 99% of the work is done in less than 1% of the time. So the "average" state of Mars may not be very relevant to rock formation, dune mobility, erosion rates, and even gully and ripple formation.

OTOH, I do like models where whatever happens on Mars, does so in conditions not very different from today's. One observation is that the Meridiani acid fluids would be metastable on Modern Mars. Although they would lose H2O to the thin atmosphere, that actually helps, since the chemical reaction with rock that deposits sulphates also lowers the acidity and raises the freezing point as it makes a more dilute solution, so there's a battle between freezing, boiling, and reacting, implying a dynamic environment with recharge of acid and then environmental processes that concentrate the acid.

Earth is too wet to get good strong acids, but Mars has natural mechanisms to concentrate them through near-vacuum boiling and ultrafreezing. Therefore, what we see on Mars may exceed anything encountered on Earth, and we probaly need to run novel experiments to simulate the conditions.

All of which leads back to the point that Mars is not Earth, but physics, chemistry, and geology can be translated, if we take care to match appropriate conditons. I'm not sure the caveats are adequately applied in "press-release science".