This suggestion is about the mining mechanic itself. Instead of having roids and hulks be containers that stay until emptied, have them destroyed immediately on prospecting and the contents left drifting in space. In other words, the mining beam breaks the roid apart and the prospector can then tractor in the items (or not as they choose).
This solves a number of problems (among them cherry-picking) and also offers new possibilities for pop-rock implementation (I think the current one was a bad idea as implemented in Live and bad as replicated here). Using this model, every roid is a potential pop-rock to a miner, and the skill level of the miner reduces the chance and impact of something bad happening.
In this model, a low-level miner can mine a high-level roid if they're willing to take the chance of getting creamed, and a high level miner still has a chance of getting nicked here and there as they mine.
And regardless of what a miner takes or doesn't take, the roid is cleared, so the issues from cherrypicking go away.