In general, fair enough. The "late game" - though there's more of it now - is still not too much of a thing, so I'm sure lots of things could get smoothed out.
More specifically about this - it could also be that, say, you're more focused on colonies, and someone with more focus on building up their fleet would find it worthwhile. I also wouldn't write off a month's worth of income as not being useful - you're still going to be doing *something*, right? It could easily be a "swing by on the way elsewhere" or just "more profitable than anything else active right now" type of thing. Point being that colony income is passive, right, so it's not directly competing with other activities unless it completely trivializes them.
(The higher-bounty fleet is going to have way more salvage, too, as well as a really good chance of having some recoverable Onslaughts, perhaps even the XIV. That's not to be underestimated, but is lost entirely when just looking at the reward amount.)
But as a more general point, there's always going to be some combination of priorities that results in some missions/activities not being worth doing at some point, right? There are separate things with their own difficulty curves and depending on what path you take through the game they'll line up differently.