It' pretty much up to the miner/trader to choose whether or not to hire escorts. It's a calculated risk, not necessarily a sign of RP deficiency. If you're going to beat miners/traders with the Greedy Club, you could beat a few pirates/terrorists with it while you're at it.
Escorts do work, but they are definitely not a silver bullet to the pirate's werewolf. If the pirate/terrorist is bent on destroying the trader, he'll very likely succeed. If you manage to employ an an armada, it will concursely eat a good chunk of your profits. Convoying with other traders is fun, but you still need escort cover, especially if there's no Shires in your convoy. On that note, it would really be nifty (well, not so nifty for the bad guys) if other houses had access to large transports with multiple turrets, like the Bretonia Shire and the Kusari CT.
I, at least, have dificulty finding reliable escorts in game within a reasonable time frame. In those cases I just haul the goods myself and take my chances. If I get zapped, I don't complain if everything happened in a spirit of good sportmanship and roleplaying.
Now, how to define good sportsmanship and its relationship to roleplaying, now that is a subject for another thread entirely. And likely not one to find any consensus on, since many in our community see themselves as setting the gold standard for both.
