Just some head canon ideas
With the Bears being generally seen as the cautious and 'camper' Clan, it makes sense that the Bears would basically try and use every resource they could without relying on others. So when they turned to Asteroid mining they didn't approach perhaps the only experts on it in Clan space, The Free Guilds but instead, opted to do it themselves and threw resources, money and people at the problem until they cracked it and got it working efficiently.
And once they got it working efficiently, they really went into it in a big way, but this took time and effort, the Bears, never eager to rush into a decision took a decade or so to get the whole thing working, and they were not willing to go with 'good enough' they wanted to get it RIGHT. So whilst they might have been quietly laughed at behind their backs for 'obviously' wasting resources on such endeavours, when it came into effect the economic boost and the efficiency of their asteroid mining systems, ships etc all gave them a BIG boost, which the other Clans were then scrabbling to keep up with as this obviously works and is worth the investment.
Problem is, its a civilian thing, the other Clans were mostly too proud to be seen to Trial for something in the industrial sector. So they had to develop it themselves and were playing catch up, and the Bears had the biggest advantage in the area and thus their systems for asteroid mining and processing were far better than the other Clans who then rushed out to use asteroid miners of their own.
Also RE Drones, I'm a bit iffy on if the Clans would use them. They still apparently do a lot of stuff by hand when it comes to manual labour (farming by hand etc) so I doubt something like the Cargorilla would be used. BUT, if we made the Clans actually smart, they'd actually work to make their systems more efficient and something like this would almost certinally be used by them (and would be used by the Free Guilds regardless).
I could even see something like the tether/power lead system used by the EVA's on Cargorilla like drones (which I assume operate like a damn big remote control, kind of like our drones do now rather than using AI etc) to make sure they are very much demilitarized and to stop them from basically going too far or being hijacked.
