Alright, so, mines.
Ridiculous at the moment. A few things need to be done. Here are some suggestions (they probably don't all work together. Mix and match, great tastes that can taste great together!)
1) Limit mines to XX per gravity well. Say 20, 50 tops? Something. Advent dropping 1000 homing mines into a system is uncool.
2) Need some sort of minesweeper ship (or ability for scouts, beyond "decloaking"). Perhaps a cruiser of some sort. Can find and destroy mines, takes XX seconds to destroy each one. Say 5 seconds or so? So that mines aren't useless, but you can deal with them without having to build a tonne of scouts. (If this is already in the game, can the interface guys make it more obvious?)
3) Can only mine gravity wells you control
4) Make them shootable; This would leave people with a choice, destroy the minefields, or destroy something else and risk the mines. Or for the invisible ones, you'd have to know they were there such that you could shoot them... (hence the scouts)
5) Make mines a game option (are they in or out)
====
That's all I got for now.