I, for one, love the mining system as it is, warts and all.
There's isn't much more satisfying than blasting a lone miner in a transport in my transport because he was too dumb to hire an escort, and making off with an hours' worth of work in 30 seconds flat.
Seriously. An escort, of absolutely any kind (even another transport), will scare me off. All I have are type-2's. And so do a lot of other transport pie rats. I don't stand a chance against anything that can move faster than my turrets.