The issue that make mining/botanist feel tedius and boring at later levels, is the running in a circle between 4 nodes, and only have 4 attempts at each. Its a running game.
They could have added more nodes over a wider area. There are plenty of space in the game, why not use it?
Back in 1.0, there were many underground caves, small non-instanced dungeons. They could have been perfect gathering areas.