Story

What's the point of floating cities on Venus anyway? I mean, if the population is going to be stuck in a tin-can anyway, you might as well do it in a tin-can that is /going/ somewhere or can do something useful. At least on a Mars colony you nominally have easier access to local resources, but - except for some highly polluted atmosphere - Venus doesn't even offer that. Focus on L-4 and -5 space platforms, asteroid mining, even interstellar generation ships; all would be more productive uses of our resources than bobbing about in Venus's atmosphere.

I've never been a fan of planetary colonization anyway; short of finding a 1-in-a-million life-bearing planet, we're probably better off remaining in space; we're going to be stuck in artificial habitats no matter where we go, and we can find the same resources in solar orbit.

Life has spent 2 billion years crawling out a deep gravity well; there's no reason we have to immediately dive right back in.