Many good ideas and points in this thread. Being a few beers in as I normally am on Sunday fun day, lets me see what sense I can make of this thread.
1. Mining titan at the levels required by the top tier corps/alliances is a major PITA
2. Nobody likes bots, everybody likes win buttons (but only when they're holding the button), people are generally selfish and rude and anti-social and would like to be completely self sufficient despite their interest in playing an MMO
3. Mining is a time sink... Some vets like it that way (civilizations are built on the backs of farmers), while others prefer new game mechanics (it's the year 2200+, this is a game, we have FREAKIN ROBOTS, can't we pretend that humanity had finally tackled some of the most annoying productivity problems)
4. Game population is thin, but we're expecting and hoping for an influx of noobs... where will they fit in?
5. Titan currently goes for 0.8 on the market, less than half of other ores while occupying half the volume and mining at less than half the rate... anyone mining for profit at market prices would be better off mining pretty much anything else.
The answer seems obvious to me... Titan mining should not be easier for the existing player base, but harder. Everything that makes titan such a giant PITA for a single highly skilled 500k+ EP agent makes mining titan perfect for a dozen or so 50-100k EP noobs who can get their foot in the door and make a real contribution to the player based community on basically day 1.
Remove titan from Beta/Gamma... Let market prices appreciate and force Beta/Gamma agents to complete frustration as they Alpha mine while switching targets every half second in their Revilers OR recruit and support legions of Termis level agents that are working their way up.
In a healthy economy highly skilled people/organizations could do everything themselves but choose not to because their time and skills could be spent more profitably paying others to do the less profitable work that they would rather not do themselves.
So I suggest making titan patches larger and more green and removing them from beta/gamma islands until Titan prices begin to appreciate thus indicating higher demand... In fact I think all resource spawns density and frequency should be tied to market prices in some kind of sneaky under the hood algorithim that watches the 60 day moving average or something along those lines.
Also... I love the idea of deployable mining structures, probes, thumpers etc... Best mining experience I ever had was in SWG where I would ride around looking for the best place to place my mining structure... (more prospecting/artifacting than mining) I think in many ways we are almost their already (with afk lizquit/HDT miners)... Keep the current system in place for ores but introduce low yield afk mining derricks for the liquids, make miners fill them with energy (plasma?) and occasionally empty the finite storage bins. Leave the option of high yield active mining in the game for those who prefer it.