Bottlenecks

I've plotted out enough sites of interest in the Venerean orbital tier that it is productive to identify and collect which of these are strategic. These are such places as are useful, and not shareable.

As counterexamples: The 50s° latitude band in ecliptic-north is assuredly useful; but this band can support many cities. Or, consider the south pole: there's only one of that, but nobody is clamouring to float a city in a permanent tornado. (The north might have more use.)

Between any two planets, flies a fleet of Hohmann transfer ships, which start and stop in the same times and places. Some of these are built to support passengers who must start work on their way. Hop David would have Venus' moving Hohmann stations be permanent cyclers, or near-enough; he counts five inbound and another five outbound.

In any orbit the libration-points are strategic - to varying degrees. L1 and (on the other side of the Sun) L3 can't support much of a halo each, but their value is limited; for Venus' tier, I think the whole Solar System will be pleased to let sunwatchers keep these two. By contrast the L4 and (for Venus) L5 points offer wide space for kidneybean orbits: here, I'd imagine a king-of-the-hill contest over the most-centred bean, or for Hohmann supply and scavenging. For the Venus region proper, its L2 is the greatest prize. And there's 12 degrees behind STL5, for that last run between Hohmann paths.

The Venus umbra offers some extra room in the lower altitudes but here, the 500000ish km altitudes cost less delta-V for the highest passing satellites and, from that height, float closest to L2. Since narrower, this pseudoörbit is more jealously sought.

All large-ish planets have a Hill Sphere between L1 and L2 as can kick pass-through craft to higher speeds. In true orbit, over Venus as over Earth, the low-altitude shell has less volume and is better-shielded. Venus' in particular is a popular aerobrake for the rest of the System. Even if nobody runs a permanent station here, stationary-bandits will want to charge rents hereabout. As for those permanent stations: I did maths on the highest-altitude Earth-facer. 12:1 synodic resonance, 48.66 synodic, 530567 km - there may be more, further down. They serve Hohmann traffic out to Earth bypassing L2.

The Flotilla over the clouds will not (I now think) run over the whole 584 day synod but, when it does run, it's clustered in one spot - 11 AM dayside.

Down on Venus itself, whatever mines are drilled into the uplands, the capital-outlay to do so will be so exorbitant that any such mine is strategic for claimjumpers. As more mines are opened in any given hotspot the focus will shift more to the ladder leading up to the clouds. Likewise clusters of floating bubbles will prize the water-bearing torus above them. But here we're getting into artificial MacGuffins, not forced by geography and astro-aerophysics.