First let me say that, as an explorer, I really appreciate the viability the new credit payouts offer for my time, I did it without this added incentive in the past, and would probably continue to do it even without it, but it's nice, that's all I'm saying.
Second, I would really love some new gameplay mechanics to use in exploring, you mentioned probes, which would be cool, but you also have to remember that a probe is going to be pretty small, and as such, might not be big enough to fit an FSD required to go into super cruise. The sidewinder is the smallest ship in the Elite universe that can fit one, so barring a huge breakthrough in technology, probes big enough to fit an FSD wouldn't fit in any but the biggest ships (e.g. Anaconda, Clipper, and Federal Corvette).
I don't oppose the idea of probes or drones, only the purpose for them that you describe. It would be cool to be able to send a probe to the surface of a planet that can be left behind for a time to scan for surface features, life forms, weather patterns, etc. after you've left the system, uploading this information in packages to your ship as you travel the galaxy. This enhanced data could add to the value of the scan data and provide a much more in-depth look at the surface, subsurface, or atmosphere of planets that aren't currently landable.
Also, It seems to me that what you're describing is more on par with how Eve Online does scanning, a series of probes sent out from your ship to detect signals and triangulate their origins. This wouldn't work in Elite partially because of the reason I stated above, and also because probe scanning takes more time, which is fine in Eve, since there are nowhere near as many systems to cover and you're scanning for completely different things. In Elite, I'm sure I don't have to tell you, explorers can cover many thousands of lightyears in trips taking anywhere from a day to months before they return to the bubble to restock, and anything that slows down the discovery process at this point would be counter-productive.