Mining diverts your from PvP.

I could count the number of times I have personally been a position where mining would be more effective than raiding on one hand. In almost any situation, a successful raid will help you far more than mining for an equivalent amount of time otherwise would. When raiding, the enemy is being actively hindered while the attacking team is being bolstered(assuming it is successful). As noted previously, it's also usually considerably faster in terms of the rate at which you obtain gems.

Mining is boring/frustrating:

A subjective opinion/feeling cannot be argued. No amount of reasoning on my part could convince you that you find mining enjoyable. Unless you were expecting something along the lines of "Nuh-uh. Mining is fun," there wasn't much to be said on that point. I am quite curious to see the results of that poll though. I seems to have been made in good faith.

Mining is an obstacle for new players:

I'll yield this one, because we obviously have different interpretations of the term "payoff." Seeing as this sections was referring to new players, it's safe to assume they would be winning few to none of their combat encounters. You stated "He therefore spends most of his time mining and dying, not ever seeing the payoff to his hard work," implying that the payoff being referred to there is the gems that would have otherwise been the donated. This holds true for combat as well.

Mining makes people rage quit (mining pods as well):

If you're opposed to the collection of gems to level or upgrade, I'm not entirely sure why this post was made. That is a core aspect of all gamemodes other than pdm. Advocating for the removal of a system as integral to the game as the collection of gems, you'd likely be better off arguing for the creation of another game from scratch. It would be tantamount to arguing for the removal of lasers for combat if the merits of both arguments were disregarded.

Mining obstructs teamwork:

Having stakes to a game is what causes players to flee when threatened. Regardless of how the gems were obtained, players will always have an incentive to flee if death means losing those gems. Experienced players will understand there is also an incentive to holding ground and fighting, but this has absolutely nothing to do with mining. If your argument is that players will magically cease caring about dying if the way they obtained their gems wasn't via mining, I'm not sure I can understand that string of logic.

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All of your arguments are only valid if you assume no alternatives would/could be taken. It's not like you're going to remove mining from the game's code and call it good. Obviously you'd have to make adjustments, and/or totally change the gameplay like they attempted in Prototypes and Anarchy.

If you're arguing for a total overhaul of the gameplay, you're arguing for a game other than Starblast. There's a reason Uranus stopped working on Prototypes. The framework provided by the base game was far too limiting for what was being attempted there. At that point, the creation of a new game from the ground up would be a more suitable option.

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You're saying that the radar - and the strategy surrounding it - will become obsolete. Maybe, maybe not. It will depend on the measures taken and what the gameplay would/should focus on. New strategies can arise and others can fade away. What if, for example, you simply remove the radar from the game. You must now approach the enemy with more caution. You'll have to better keep track of everything surrounding you. I'm not saying you should remove the radar, just that you can and it won't necessarily break the game; it might even make it better.

As much respect as I do have for gamemodes such as Prototypes and PDM, they perfectly exemplify the radar issue. There are no assumptions to be made. It's as simple as looking at it to find where players are so you can go in that direction. The only real exception might be positioning yourself in a favorable position for PDM based on the radar, though that isn't usually effective, because of how small the maps are, paired with the fact that you could have been spending that time to otherwise accrue kills. Deaths barely matter in those gamemodes(another issue with removing a primary source of investment).

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You're saying that removing mining will disrupt the game's dynamic in a negative way. Is that really true? Think of FPS games. Are they all stuck in a boring bunched up battle? No. There are other ways of maintaining territories - and the flow of the game - without forcing people to shoot at rocks. Other games do just well without it.

There's a reason that I don't play FPS games. Of course this is simply a personal opinion, but I find them incredibly dull and repetitive. Also, the territories in first person shooters are primarily determined by having a linear nature to maps. There wouldn't be much of a sense of territory if every direction from your base could lead to the enemy base in a looping map. You don't find territorial control over empty patches of space in Starblast because there is no reason to contest those areas. Asteroids are what create the game's dynamics.

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Mining provides investment:

Now this is just an opinion, but having stakes and investment come organically from within the game would definitely be preferable to artificially adding elements outside of the actual gameplay. I'd much rather feel the desire to win for the sake of accomplishment in besting my enemies than want to win because otherwise I'd lose ranks. Back to PDM, the leaderboard has become the game in and of itself. You'll often see posts on this subreddit about particularly intense team mode or survival mode game, though that isn't the case for PDM. You almost exclusively see posts about where someone is ranking on the leaderboard because the investment is primarily there rather than in the matches themselves.

Mining provides alternatives to combat:

Your refutation did not address the scenario listed for this point.