The use of the OAM for rare resources make a huge amount of sense. However when you start to look at it for T1 resources, it make little sense to use the OAM. A way to make it more worth using would be to have it use fusion cells or boost the output for lower level resouces. I just noticed that it seams like few people use it for more then gold and magnesium. When you consider how much a T3 auto miner can output for the T1 resources, its hard to use the auto miner cores for iron or copper.
I think the convenience and the fact it doesn’t get wiped makes it attractive. If you are in PVE you can get quite a lot of cores from POIs and also buy some from traders. Having said that I use it for gold and magnesium only. Having it work for 2 days per core would work well. Fusion cells would be too easy unless it required a very large amount of them.
Probably the biggest reason I don’t bother with other resources is the cap- 10K is too small for them and it fills up very quickly (at level 10) compared to the rare resources which you can leave running for a much longer period of time without needing a trip to EGS HQ. Increasing the capacity of the non-rare ones is probably the most important chang I would like to see.
I mostly leave mine untouched and full on level 10, it’s a great means to get resources in an extreme bind (for a small cost of credits).