Originally Posted by
RobinGBrown
I don't think Redbeard meant that it would take time for his characters to train the astrometrics skills but that it would take time for him to actually do the probing task himself.
Probing is one of the few actual player skills in EVE and it takes a lot of real time to practice and get good at it as it's quite counterintuitive at first (or the GUI is badly designed!) it's also a bit hit and miss as you always find a lot of wormholes but not very many mining sites as there's a good chance there will be no gravimetric site in a given system.
So scanning for gravimetric sites in order to clean them out with miners means probing down signals in a whole constellation which might take an hour or three before you can fleet up and start mining, all for only a small upgrade in the quality or quantity of the ore to be mined.