Look, I'm all for pretty pictures, and in fact I think there are some opportunities to have gotten some very cool shots for not a lot of bandwidth that I wish JPL had taken.

But at the end of the day, which would be a more exciting thing for you to be able to say:

"Wow, that was a really cool view from the hill at Gusev, all those rocks and the crater rim in the background!"

or

"Wow, it turns out there really was a lake at Gusev!"

If what you want is the former, well, that's one way of looking at it. Frankly, I'd kill for the chance to be there myself with a Polaris ATV, my trusty 35mm gear, and a bazillion rolls of film. Along with some O2 tanks and warm mittens... :)

But that's not worth spending 3/4 billion of the taxpayers money, and it won't answer key questions.

If what you're looking for is proof that there was water, a lake, life, whatever, it isn't going to come just from driving around aimlessly and taking pictures. Unless we find something as ovbious as a whale bone, a shipwreck, or 3-billion year old lakeshore hot dog stand on the other side of the hill, all we're likely to see are more rocks. Cool rocks, interesting rocks, but what KIND of rocks? Who the hell knows, that's what the scientific study part is about.

For example, take today's results on Clovis, which you would suggest we have skipped other than photographing. Turns out we now know it is very, very soft relative to unweathered basalt. And, it is just full of chlorine and bromine; if anything they underplayed that at the press conf. It's got nearly as much as in the Eagle Crater evaporites, as well as strongly elevated potassium, and to a lesser extent sulfur (but much higher Cl/Br relative to S than at Meridiani). Now *that* is exciting, even more so than how cool the view up there is. Seems pretty likely that it isn't soft just because it's a poorly consolidated breccia or something, but really is water-altered.

And what amazing discovery are we likely to find? We've seen the area for kilometers around Endurance crater at 1m/pixel resolution, and it's pretty much more of same -- worth looking at, but unless there's a skull sitting out on the plains nothing likely to be fantasitically different. Ditto for the Columbia Hills, though with a little less confidence.