The community overall has ludicrous amounts of money. The Barge spendings and the Special Equipment Dealership total over 1 trillion credits.
I really don't think we need another source of server-generated cash flow. There are surely players around willing to fund bounty hunting; one of them just volunteered.
I think the bigger problem is the paperwork involved. If players could pay into a bounty pool and have bountyhunting handled via server plugin that would be fine but not having an automated way to claim and pay out bounties is meh. Maybe if there was some sort of API to transfer money between characters we could outsource this to the community but I'm not sure if that's possible.
You're right about that; the annoying paperwork is certainly a deterrent. It's why I personally never really got into bounty hunting.
The flipside is that it also serves as an effort threshold to prevent exploiting, as in, people meeting up and killing each other deliberately to cash in on bounties. If communicated solely over voice, this would be virtually impossible to prove.
There's no way of knowing this for sure, but I suspect that this is a rare occurrence now. It just wouldn't be worth it generally.
If there's an automated plugin however, this could be done with way less effort and way less attention drawn, and unscrupulous players might be more inclined to make some quick cash that way.
It's why I've always been skeptical of such a system, which wouldn't be too hard to implement from a technical standpoint.