It's actually always puzzled me how the AI seems at times completely unaware of the existence of asteroids.
For maneuvering, it ignores asteroids below a certain mass (relative to the ship's mass and armor state). The evasive actions it takes are relatively drastic, and this is necessary so that it can function at all inside a dense asteroid field. Hmm. It might make sense to only ignore these if there are a lot of asteroids about, or just consider the heaviest nearby asteroid, or some such. Added to list of things to take a look at.
I don't know if varying AI ship captains are still going to happen, but this could open the way to some fun AI variation that would show up. One type of captain could fly optimal and ignore asteroids if they aren't a threat, another could always choose to wildly dodge around them, while another might blast any asteroid that crosses its path.
