To me it looks like you are whining about the very effect the Devs intended to introduce with this change - making mining a bit less predictable.
Look I understand you weren't thrilled that you didn't immediately find fully red fields 2m from the terminal, but you make it sound like hours of coordinated effort were wasted while you ran around all of NIA. In reality you probably spend like 20min doing all of that.
I like this change, it makes all areas of the map travelled more, you find people in unexpected places and some areas can be a bit more tricky to mine.
Yeah you can't 100% afk from start to finish anymore, but maybe that's not such a bad thing?
Finally, if 2 people scan in 2 different directions guess what happens to the time it takes to find a good field? But yeah, other people in my MMO???!