At present everyone mines near the stations, theres no incentive to go out into dangerous areas to mine. I suggest changing the game so that all asteroids in station and wormhole sectors start out with a higher heat. maybe 75-100. This would encourage players to go exploring.

Another way to encourage this would be to have mining missions where you have to bring back X-units of Y-ore. The ore would never be anything more common than van-azek or ishik, and after a few levels of mining would be the rare ores. Make the reward for the mission high enough to justify the effort.
The best thing would be to have a set reward, and make them groupable, with the reward being distributed evenly across the group. This would allow some members of the group to do the mining, some members to act as haulers to get the ore back to the station, and some members to act as defenders, keeping the transports and miners safe.

Us at dWo (www.dooworldorder.com) do mine out side of stations. As many of us have high levels in mining it's easier to lev up if we mine better ores.

How ever I too think there should be bigger rewards for mining out side of stations. I really like your suggestions.

I personally would like there to be more reason to mine in bot sectors. I have done it before with and escort from MERC and it was vary fun, but the profits were about the same as I could get mining at some stations. So other then it just being fun, it's just not worth it.

I wonder if the devs could write a script that would put higher value ores in sectors with more bots ( and maybe one or two in empty sectors as an incentive to explore a bit ). Right now it just seems totally random.. and even if you do try to mine in a dangerous sector, escorting the other guy would be near impossible. How are you going to keep a constant stream of Prosus assaults that are attacking someone ELSE at bay?

although i share many of your feelings, i feel that perhaps there are some opportunities we have yet to discover.

I do think there is some method to how the asteroids were placed. I have found some pretty nice rare ore asteroids in "empty" space, and there are patterns to where the good Van Azek and Ishik asteroids are in many sectors. It does seem though that a tweak may be in order. It makes sense that wherever stations are located, the asteroids should largely have been tapped already. Also, in sectors where bots are mining, those asteroids should also be hard to mine (except for the outskirts of those systems where bots don't normally go). Also, if a sector has some crazy bots, it should make sense that there is some good mining to be had there. Now some of this may indeed be the case. How many times has anyone gone to a sector with high level bots and mined extensively? I am sure though that station mining is a bit too easy..
While we're on topic, if the types of ores were extended more, then there'd be more incentive to search for these new ores.