I've dropped almost all of my automining tiles (due to the tedium & tax required to maintain them at the expense of gameplay), and am using asteroids as my primary source of self-gathered ore. Of course I'll use the market for anything I need above this. While there is still work involved in hand mining, its very different to the terrible automining that I've been forcing myself to do since it was introduced (and now just can't tolerate any more). Asteroid mining also conveniently has no taxes, so I can do it at my own pace, and not need to produce each week to cover costs.
One thing that could be improved here though is the size of ore nodes, particularly of T1. Mining hundreds of kL of T1 from asteroids is fine in itself, but doing it in multiples of 5-6kl drags it out a little. It would be a QoL step to have T1 (only) have a random distribution of node sizes, say 5k, 10k (rarer), 20k (rarest), so that there's a bit of efficiency gain for T1 mining, as well as that tiny bit of anticipation when finding a new node, whether it is a bigger one or not. This was one of the fun parts of planetary underground mining - finding a node, start mining it, and then finding that it Just Keeps On Going! ๐ This would make a really nice addition to asteroids, and limiting it to T1 wouldn't affect balance elsewhere. We don't need meganodes, but some variety would be nice.