I haven't said all activities should be equally rewarding. I've said that the reward should be balanced against the risk/effort, and that the new mining payouts seem excessive. That's all.
Me having a bit of a rant about the balance being off is not me trying to install galaxy-wide video-game communism.
Like, I actually agree with what you're saying in point (2). 'Balanced against each other' doesn't mean 'They all pay the same'. Mining, which is easy and low-risk, should not be far more profitable than combat, which requires skill and is high-risk. That's what I mean by 'balance'.
To an extent I agree with you, though I had my Type 10 blown up recently just because I hesitated for a second too long in dropping my cargo to a pirate. (Well, technically I didn't hesitate, the guy was just impatient and it took me tad too long in locating the correct function to drop what he wanted). Try running away or fighting back in that, when you have equipment geared towards long jump range and mining, not combat. It took'em NPCs like 20s to drop me down.
You still haven't answered my question, though. Why should be relatively easy mining less profitable than relatively more skill-demanding combat?
See, my brother's a coal miner, and his line of work is incomparably more dangerous than me sitting on my butt in the office, clicking databases. And yet I earn more.
Why is that?
And I still don't agree mining earns too much in comparison. I did my share of mining in the past few days and it wasn't until I fully grasped the new Pulse Scanner, learned how to interpret the colors, and started locating crackable asteroids with better efficiency, until I reached around 30MCr per hour. Does that sound excessive? It doesn't in my book, unless you're factoring only the Opal rush of recent, which is an extreme case scenario. But then comes a question: how is the extreme case scenario representative of mining income as a whole? It's not!
So instead of arguing with you, I would like to ask in the spirit of good intentions: how much did you earn in your mining venture and what did you mine?
This should allow me to better understand where you come from.