Re-imagining Robotics Research: The Decrypter

[Sundance]

Though we'd need to be careful to not really step on any robotic toes when it comes to special abilities. I'm down with all of Sundance's suggestions except being able to interact with doors like a borg.

I agree. I feel like cybernetic implants/surgery should be unique from genetics, like a half-way house between human and borg, having some features that borgs have, but with some major drawbacks. Like, I don't even like how machine translaters work, imo they should have a drawback too in that they come up on the killswitch computer which the AI can activate to stun+burn the implanted when rogue.

The one thing I worry about in regards to giving the Roboticist a minigame is that the roboticist can do a lot of things to help the station and there's a possibility he could just ignore them completely in favor of playing more minigame.

This is a legit concern. Although you've used the word bored twice in your sentence so I presume you know where i'm coming from.
The major difference between the roboticist and geneticists is two things: Their borgs, and the surgery table. I suggested that the more borgs a roboticist has, the more free data he has access to the computer. This acts as an incentive for the roboticists to still do one aspect of their job, while having an advantage of the other. Geneticists lack this (although I think cloning should add money to the research budget)
The surgery table is also the other biggie. I think the unlocked stuff shouldn't be just simple implants, but require some amount of surgery to do. This will take the roboticist away from the decrypter.

What's a robotics research minigame going to do to the availability of metal, medibots, borg limbs, upgrades, and flashes in Medbay?

The mini-game will increase the amount of metal, as it will unlock more effective production, stuff requiring less metal/rarer materials to produce upgrades. It's often the MD who goes into robotics to make medibots, and as HoS I often go into robotics to make securitrons.