Science & Industry

LOL, you are correct sir.
If you actually keep track, when a belt respawns it will have the exact same number of rocks of the exact same types after a respawn as it had before. Regardless of whether it has been completely mined out or not. The myth was that by only popping the worthless rocks they could respawn as better rocks. this is not true. However the other supposed myth is that if you do not pop the rocks but leave them with a cycle or less left in them, when the belt respawns the rocks will increase in size. after several weeks of doing this you will have the rocks spawning at the maximum size allowed for that belt. if you pop a rock it will respawn at the minimum size and again require time to grow.

The problem with this is it takes a lot of time and patience to groom a belt in this way, and there is nothing stopping some other miner from coming along and taking that last little bit of the rocks. When that happens all your work is for nothing. but even miners that groom belts will mine everything, including the veldspar. the difference in price is not enough to make it worthwhile to skip them over, especially in a groomed belt where the veldspar rocks are huge.

However believe what the op is asking is about cherry picking. rather than mining one or two belts fully, either empty or to a groomed state, there are those that will go out and pull all the pyroxeres and scordite out of 10 different belts. sure the isk/m3 they are left with at the end will be higher, but the time lost moving between so many belts combined with the partial cycles due to the more valuable rocks being much smaller leaves you with a much lower total m3 of ore mined. the difference in isk per hour made from cherry picking compared to strip mining is insignificant. But I know many will just continue on doing it, but that effectively allows smarter miners to groom the lower end ores in those same belts.

Is veldspar worth mining? Hell yes, just ask the most famous experienced miner in the EVE universe, Chribba, he mines veldspar, and has built an empire on it.

Exactly. It's random. No amount of "grooming" is going to give you a belt of only the types of asteroids that you want. Do you know why? Because some guy like me is going to come along and pop every single asteroid in that belt, therefore negating any attempt at "grooming" that you were working toward.

The only way this would even be remotely feasible is in null-sec with sovereignty where you can control access to the belts to an extent, and even then it would take a very, very long time and a lot of luck with the random ore spawns.