The scouts by themselves aren't that great yet on full automation, they auto-return to their point of origin way too much and themselves never attack mines, which means you still only get small windows of opportunity to shoot at mines if you leave them on auto.

They do better if you put them into a fleet and set it on loose cohesion (depending on the situation, you might want to put your combat ships on hold position so they don't actually move outside of formation). This way the scouts' detection reaches a bit in front of the fleet that you'll be able to shoot down most of the mines before you plow through them. But I still think the scouts' formation rank in the fleet should be moved up to be right behind the front line ships. Right now if you fleet some scouts, they get put pretty much in the middle, between front line and long range/support.

That and they need to shoot mines they detect, otherwise they get confused when you have a bunch of scouts trying to target the same mine and most of them try to auto-return - which is especially bad if you have a fleet for just the scouts and the fleet leader returns

Well, that's what it attempts to do on auto-detection. And a single scout does ok, it goes from mine to mine. But when you throw a bunch of scouts together they get confused. Their priority is detection only, so they don't attack already-uncovered mines and they get confused when the mine they wanted is taken and think they're done, so they auto-return to jump-in and then realize "oh hey, there's still mines up" and restart the cycle.

I did send a set up save and a rather lengthy description of this to one of IC's guys that got back to me on the beta 2 auto stuff, so hopefully it'll still get tweaked a bit