The drones will be automated? if they are I can live with that, if not its a waste of development time as you'll still have to spend time manually collecting the minerals.
Depends on what kind of drones they come up with, and whatever else they add to mining (certainly needs moar depth but hey, early days). IDK if they're looking at autoscoopers or working in some kind of more complex mechanic for them. I'd imagine the larger/ more expensive your kit, the easier it would make it to collect and proc ores. Though I'm not against a remote-controlled unit for entry-level kit. It'd at least save people having to fly the full ship around like a madman. A smaller unit could alternatively do some kind of scan, land, and drill method. That'd eliminate playing fetch altogether for smaller mining ops.