I've recently run into this situation several times. I will be traveling in some non-straight-forward vector, and need to jettison cargo. When I do the jettison, the cargo gets picked up very quickly again. I understand that there are cases where your ship collides with the cargo. However, could the game automatically toggle the cargo tractor beam off for a short amount of time (quarter second, or half second) to reduce the likelyhood of immediately picking up the cargo again?

+1. Accidentally picking up cargo immediately after you drop it is both annoying and unnecessary.

Does cargo tractor even work? I never managed to get it to do anything.

There's a few threads on the issue already. In my experience it depends on the ship model you're flying whether you risk picking it up again or not, so in my opinion the better solution would be to simply spawn jettisoned cargo slightly further away from the ship (ideally below rather than behind) to avoid this without having to mess with other functionality that would potentially impede on game systems incl. plugins using them.

Part of tonight's release:

- Added a 60 second tractor-beam cooldown for crates that you jettison. This means, for 60 seconds after a given crate is jettisoned from your ship, it will not be picked up by your ship's tractor-beam.