Least yours freaking work.
I haven't been able to get a drone to mine in MONTHS, no matter how I freaking build them.
I do have a nice basic mining drone template. Finally. And they do work. I find that any frills (slaved salvage effects, additional systems, etc) make them more likely to fail, as does too much thrust (more than 2:1 in my experience)somehow, but I use 4 of them, and I can park near a good cluster, order mining, window out and do some work, then window back in 15 minutes later and they're typically done with the whole cluster.
I just wish they could mine the neighboring clusters as well since they're loaded and in sight. Certainly my personal miner can melt whole clusters in <2 minutes and eat a whole belt in an hour, which is awesome when I need tons of materials right now, but a lot of times I'm chatting, watching YouTube, reading through forums, on the phone, making food, etc. The drones are great; I can make a slow, steady income while mostly doing other things. Letting them mine everything loaded in sight would mean less maintenance, less windowing back and forth, which may sound OP, but it would still take them 30-45 minutes to clear every sector loaded around me and we can manually mine 5 times that much when have the time to, so it's still limited.
Plus, the really big balance is vulnerability. Whatever the level of productivity from passive mining, one must assume a percentage of loss because every so often some hungry player pirate is going to catch you with your windows down and you lose the whole haul plus the fleet (which is another reason I keep my mining stuff cheap, industrial, disposable - reduce overhead and loss within my playstyle).
I think better passive mining would improve flexibility of playstyles and be more accommodating for players with less active time to play. It also provides legitimate reason for predators to occasionally do some hunting with a fast ship and a scanner.
