Unless you're Kaze or Josia, you won't make any reasonable cash on bounty hunting.
Trading gives you over 35mil/hr if you know where to trade. Combined trading/mining operation can give around 50 and more mil/hr per player. You'd have to pop a snub every three minutes to get that much cash in one hour.
I agree that trading is much too profittable.
Besides... just compare the profit/hr from 4.85 and 4.86. The difference is huge.
The effect is so big that quite often, the time needed to write a post in "selling ships" is worth more than the ship itself.
I gave away many of my ships for free just because it was easier.
Now... with changes to the generic IDs and technerf system, there's no real need to even become a faction IDd indie. Not even mentioning joining official factions. People just use FL ID and haul anything anywhere only to earn cash for their first LABC.
Not only there's no motivation to haul RP cargo (for example Synth Paste for Synth Foods IDd ships) but it's more of anti-motivation. The inRP cargo is usually the least profittable - maybe except the ores for mining factions.
Now there are also PoBs - money sinks, that's for sure. But activity-sinks also. Huge ammount of hours spent on doing what is completely ooRP usually.
Oh, but (of course) someone will surely say that it induces some RP like for example GRN battleships sitting in Orkney and waiting for all those poor bastards trying to smuggle cryocubes to upgrade their bases...