Actually, Ceres is considered a farily high gravity body compared to most asteroids, and there are a hundred or more asteroids in the 100 km or above range. Even a 60 km asteroid has a fairly decent gravity, enough to get you down onto the surface and mitigate dust suspension, and allow you to do useful work. When I say useful work, I'm usually talking about the automated solar powered low gravity filling of empty fuel tanks with regolith, totally unmanned.

Larger asteroids with spectroscopically detected surface fragments composed of nearly pure nickel iron alloys, suitably busted up into the decimeter range, have already been clearly identified.

Clearly great caution will need to be exercised when 'rendezvousing' with the surface of low gravity asteroids or moons like Phobos and Deimos, which is precisely why these kinds of missions will need to be accomplished first.

Besides, if you go to Phobos and Deimos, just getting there and back alive retires most of the risk of a Mars surface mission, which is so far down the road as not even to be on the horizon, certainly not worthy of any serious consideration yet.

Going to the Moon would mean much shorter trips

Which does nothing to solve any of the problems of NEO rendezvous, which will go a long way to solving problems of protecting the Earth from future impacts, RIGHT NOW.

You can debate all you want - the moon and Mars are off the table. Trust me. The moon isn't going to crash into the Earth, and the cost of getting there and back is astronomical, and yields no short term benefits to Earth, whereas the continuation, refinement and improvement of space infrastructure and assets which we possess RIGHT NOW, and can immediately be thrown at the problem of long duration spaceflight in low Earth orbit RIGHT NOW, and will yield immediate benefits for planet Earth RIGHT NOW, is far safer and less costly that any moon program, which as already degenerated in three short years into a boondoggle, and provides nothing but highly specialized hardware almost useless to the task at hand. Trying to debate people who have little or no comprehension or understanding of the realities of living on the planet Earth, is almost farcical.

Armchair space advocates all. We're still at the propulsion and launch vehicle stage of the process, and now after three years of VSE, we have to start over.