Scanning at this stage of the game, most players will have container augmentation talents at 5, and have had plenty of time to accumulate scanners and cores, so players can now easily scan with multiple cores and scanners. I'm using 7 small cores and 21 scanners, to scan a super-flower at once. Actually, by the time I have started scanners on the 7th core, the scanners on the 1st are ready to be read. So I can keep busy while 15 minute counters go to zero, but so is the server.
What if there were a new element for scanning which could scan the whole super-flower at once, with just one element? I could scan in a radius, with a max range dictated by talents, returning results for all tiles within its range. Obviously, the longer the range, the longer for scan results to return. It should be possible for a player with the current scanners - or a smaller radius setting - to ninja someone using the system I'm proposing here. So there is a risk using a larger diameter scanning area. You wouldn't get any results until you finished the scan. The scan time versus diameter could be adjusted to give results in about the same amount of time players can achieve now with multiple cores and scanners.