Well there's reputable bounty managers here that you can find and participate because the chance of a successful project is high therefore the chances of bounty hunters get paid are also high. Whether the project is solid or not if they can't reached their target funding it will be useless.
The main problem of bounty hunters these days are not that they are not getting paid, their problem actually is the bounty reward is lesser than what they are expecting. Some bounty offers a total reward of 1 million usd in tokens, but the moment it's listed in exchange, the value could decrease to as low as 100K usd in tokens, that's sad.
Mostly yes, expectations is higher than the actual amounts of rewards to received, a lot of those bounty campaigns who able to get listed from the exchange decreased it's value from the ICO period, making it more lesser for the bounty participants to have the shares that they've expected to
received, it's disappointing but it's better than you don't get anything, good project though can bounce after those dumped if the team is really working
with the progress of their coin.