Yeah, I'm inclined to agree with the OP.  Mining seems pretty bad from an economic standpoint unless you happened to be one of the lucky ones who found out about Bitcoin in 2009 and did a bunch of CPU mining when that was still possible.  I'm more concerned about the environmental issues with mining than the economic ones personally though, considering how much energy miners use, although I do think that if we ever get to the point where bitcoin takes over fiat (highly unlikely, but we can hope), the energy miners use would likely be less than all the energy banks & the Federal Reserve uses.