Ceres is about 2.5AU from the sun, has more water than Earth and the mass of 0.00015 Earths. The ort cloud is 1,000-100,000 AU away.

I am making the assumption that we will have a much stronger preference for water closer to Earth, and we aren't talking about large gravity wells.

There's a massive practical difference between Ceres size gravity wells that can be escaped with a half-decent cannon and ones that can't. And I've never heard of people suggesting there might be life on/in Ceres.

Oort Cloud objects as in [0]? Getting to asteroids takes way to long already. Yeah, Oort cloud won't happen unless we have a magical breakthrough in propulsion as depicted in The Expanse. And at that point current intuition around gravity wells will probably not apply anymore as well.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PIA17046_-_Voyager_1_Goes...