I didn't consider the quality of the auras gems also increasing their radius, seems like quality gems combined with high level gems would be plenty. Right now with only gems leveled to a mid 60s requirement my minions often times go out of their range, that's a good suggestion to spec into it as much as I need and then respec out of them as I get quality auras and/or level up my gems more.
That's a great suggestion to disable targeting on minions, there's really no need to do it, I don't even check on their health honestly, I simply check the number now and again and resummon anything that is missing. I assume most people do that as scanning through that many minions sounds extremely tedious and not worth the time at all.
The collision issue also makes sense to me. I find it difficult to path around players in general so that makes perfect sense that they are also in between me and my items as well. I find that really frustrating. Spam clicking on your loot does seem to work better but it also has its own set of drawbacks as well, especially if you have to walk up to the item causing them to shift around, which causes you to pick up a lot of nonsense white items and basically just wastes your time in general.
Overall the loot system is just not fun. The only "competition" is who can spam click the fastest. It's retarded.
Also, and this is something that I've posted on the official Path of Exile forums, back in Diablo II, which is what everyone over there seems to look to for guidance, their beacon in the darkness of ARPGs, nobody spam clicked to pick up items and if they did then it wasn't for very long. If you played Diablo II for very long you likely used some sort of loot modification that picked up the items that you wanted for you. There was no "competition" of who could click the fastest with the lowest latency and the most perfect timing to get the loot.
Some of those people over there are so fucking retarded. They are living in Diablo II dreamland where half of the players (likely more) weren't cheating all of the time.