A lot of the issue with asteroid mining is when you jack up the sector size, the asteroid spawning doesn't scale with that. That means that most of the time you spend while asteroid mining will be spent moving between sectors, and that is pretty boring. When you have default sectors (or slightly larger) it's easy to move between asteroid fields without JDs.
I've always been down for random events when asteroid mining tho. Or even mega-asteroids that are the size of stations (and can be used as such!). +1