Yeah, that's what I meant - Combat Bonds used to be around 300Cr and you were mostly fighting Cobras or less, whereas recently there have been bigger ships up to Anaconda and you get 30-60K and above on almost all of them. The added advantage is that you can simply hang around on the periphery, watching your NPC faction buddies drop them down to 20% hull, then nip in to score the kill in a one-pass burst of heavy fire and nick the payout.
But as you say, they seem to have massively bumped the RES payouts lately.
Used to take ages of scanning everyone before I even found one ship with more than 10k on its head.