Try a Big Dipper. You break that you have some issues! 
WS
The problem with those nice, light, plastic ice skimmer/scoops is that when allowed to get a good glaze of built-up ice in the holes and where the handle joins the dish, freezing water expands of course, fatigueing and eventually cracking/flat out breaking it at the weakest points... especially but not limited to when we insist on banging off the ice!
A solution for this problem you might like, is to take and cut the middle segment from a junked pair of neoprene waders and wear this over whatever knee you naturally prefer to set down. Its a light and effective knee pad, keeps your outerwear dry, and especially if you use an old pair with thicker knees to begin with, you can just slip the plastic scoop inside, essentially cupping your knee cap (give it a fast shake first to shed most moisture). Your own escaping body heat will take care of the rest.
Here's another: Now that they make spray paint that will 'take' to plastic, why not convert the typical yellow or blaze orange plastic scoop to flat black? Absorb more IR radiation, even through clouds there's some still free for the taking.
I have two related experiments in progress.
One is to put those pac-boot liners in old cut-off neoprene waders and just skip the heavy, clunky, needs to be laced up pac boots. Seems to work fine on the relatively mild days, but you will have to cover over the felted soles to avoid endless caking issues. Why not do this with some heavier sheet plastic and a few sheet metal screws? Instant cleats, without the fuss of straps or the propensity to step out of them in deep snow?
The other trial gets back to keeping holes open. A few years back I was making and using tip-downs a LOT! Like almost daily. Solved the obvious hole cover issues easily enough, finally settling on putting an inverted styrofoam soup bowl over my holes. These I'd prep with a cursory spritz of black spray paint, and punch out just enough of a centered hole to admit a hooked minnie, plumb weight, whatever. Since we have all the slush we could want at the ready, putting a judiciously small amount at two or three points around the rim solved the blow-away issue quite well. When you go to ice a catch, in most cases the cover stays on the line and comes out on its own, although its a simple matter to poke a finger in the center hole and without getting wet lift it out, too. I even took a permanent marker and wrote around the rim various depths (4,6,8,10, ... up into the 40's or 50's at least). If you want to remember how deep each tilt was placed, just turn the cover to face the stem of the tilt, and voila.
From time to time, and especially with thin braid and a bigger fish, your taut line is going to saw through your cover, but replacements are easy enough to come by. If you cut the necks from clear plastic water bottles, these can serve essentially as 'line guides', which also solves that problem (draw a line on one, and line that up with your depth number?). Fit by compression. Makes dropping the hooked and flopping minnie through easier, especially in a breeze. Btw, a breeze blowing over the inverted soup bowl featuring the funnel opening generally keeps blowing snow out of your hole too. Keeps the holes open for a surprisingly long time, actually. Mpile on some snow and you may only have to skim them once before resetting the entire rig elsewhere anyway. You can also skip the styro and go straight to black plastic coffee 'can' lids, punched out as before. I very briefly flame the edges of these holes to make them smooth for use with extra light lines. Works, but weighs a tad more.
Finally, I used to make the stems for my tilts out of either thick copper grounding wire, or hollow water supply coil. Either choice was stiff enough, but not so stiff that the stem could not be adjusted quickly if needed, by hand. And these worked, to a point, and that point was when the 'heat' in the air was conducted into the ice (I hand-drilled out to serve as my base, formerly a small segment of plank that would still get gusted over from time to time). I thought that the ice would certainly be sufficient for hours and hours. I found out ain't necessarily so. Let the sun shine even a little and very gradually it and/or the air's 'warmth' went straight into even the thicker ice and loosened up the works. Eventually (which didn't take all that long) they would flop on over.
I went to wooden stems, and that of course solved that problem, but the unintended melting gave me the seed for another counter-application for copper coil. What if one were to fashion a ring of the stuff that would mostly set down right at the water level surface of the auger hole? Bend it so it was self supporting? Leave parts of it sticking up into the air, maybe painted or probably permo-markered black? My guess is that even if all the copper could manage to do is keep the perimeter of the hole more open, or somewhat longer, or made it easier to remove the skim, that would be a plus, gained from very little investment of time or trouble.
Anyway, just some more ideas...
Don
