Right now you can get massive amounts of the stuff required to craft most stuff very easily and quickly. Relying on sciencing to get your ores is the wrong way to do it.
Also, as someone who reviews games professionally and has made it their job to pay attention to these sorts of things, a game is just not fun if they make things to easy. There's a difference between being non-tedious and hand-held and given everything. A game needs at least some time consuming content or it's just not worth playing and might as well be some sort of test server where everyone can do console commands. A lot of people complain that they want something to be easier do not really think about things and are just trying to make things a bit easier for themselves. 9 times out of 10, once something is made easy, people will get bored of it and stop playing (example is the NGE in the game Star Wars Galaxies... made things to simple and easy and everyone quit, even though the community was complaining about wanting everything to be fast and easy). In the end, players should have some stuff that isn't easy or they will get bored quickly. There's no point to play if there's no goal to work towards (unless you're playing for role play).