@Ian Doncaster
Where to claim bounties now? At powers handler or minor faction handler? Does claiming bounties at power handler also give influence to minor power system owner, has anyone figured that out yet?
Claiming at the power handler seems to at least give normal influence effects. I don't know that anyone has had time to do a controlled test to see if the 20% bonus payout actually increases the influence gain (though, with BGS diminishing returns curves, a 20% bonus is going to be pretty marginal anyway in most circumstances)
Maybe if they disconnected PP missions from system INF that might have helped.
I think the answer to that is a combination of "they already are" and "that's impossible within their wider design goals for Powerplay"
Taking the list of activities from this post
A summary of the Activities information
but merging the various Powerplay states together
| Activity | Affects BGS? | Influence Direction |
| Bounty Hunting | Yes* | Positive |
| Collect Escape Pods | Yes | Positive |
| Holoscreen Hacking | Unknown, probably not | - |
| Power Kills | Unknown, probably not | - |
| Retrieve Odyssey Powerplay goods | Not directly | Indirectly may be negative or positive for settlement owner |
| Scan Datalinks | No | - |
| Sell for large profits | Yes, usual trade | Positive |
| Sell mined resources | Yes, usual mining | Positive |
| Sell rare goods | Yes, usual trade | Positive |
| {Various Power-specific data/goods transport activities} | Unknown, probably not | - |
| Aid + Humanitarian missions (inc Odyssey Reactivations) | Yes | Positive, but likely spread across all factions |
| Flood markets with low-value goods | Yes, though low price and lack of profit | Might be positive or negative depending on exact transaction |
| Scan ships and Wakes | No | - |
| Hand in biological research samples | No | - |
| Hand in cartography data | Yes | Positive |
| Hand in salvage | Yes | Positive |
| Commit crimes (specifically murders) | Yes | Negative |
| Complete weekly Powerplay assignments | Not directly | - |
EDIT: * Strictly, the Powerplay activity is "Collect bounties" which has no BGS effect, but let's assume that for the cash the bounties are also handed in to the same system, which then will.
Everything on the list either likely has no BGS effect at all (e.g. scanning ships, stealing Powerplay commodities from settlements), or has a BGS effect because it is just a normal gameplay action (e.g. trade, bounties) and there's no way to tell whether a player was doing it for the Powerplay effect, the BGS effect, or both (or even neither and just for the money!).
Frontier could have designed it so that (as in the original Powerplay) BGS-affecting actions had no immediate effect on Powerplay, sure - but that was specifically not their design goal: they wanted something where players could pick up merits through just playing the game, as well as through specifically "doing Powerplay", and that means actions which have BGS effects [1] because the "playing the game" actions do that too.
"Giving squadrons an easy time of managing their minor factions" has always only been at best a secondary goal for the BGS, so they're not going to design new content with that as an overriding concern. That much should have been obvious when the Stargoids came in, reduced a couple of hundred inhabited systems to wreckage in the first three months, and buried the occasional PMF entirely under an unassailable Thargoid control sphere.
There weren't many complaints at the time, because in
practice the ones they completely buried had already been crushed years ago by a more powerful PMF neighbour, and that bigger PMF while losing a substantial number of systems to the Thargoids still had plenty left. Still, the largest-by-systems PMF in the game at the time
did lose its home system to the Thargoids for well over a year, through poor luck of the draw in positioning.
[1] And generally, actions which have positive BGS effects, because - often at the request of various BGS-active player groups - ways to give
negative BGS effects "just by playing the game" have been massively reduced or discouraged over the years. Unless you're an Anarchy faction, of course, where their in-game role as "designated punching bag" has made them impossible to balance BGS-wise.
(Which is why the BGS has all the diminishing return curves nowadays - as was seen in 3.6 when those were for a very short time briefly more linear, the controlling-faction advantage in terms of attracting passing-traffic influence is so
substantial that very harsh diminishing returns are needed to keep even low-traffic systems in line)
