Facebook attacked. Payed out biggest bug bounty ever

I can't be the only one who thinks $50000 is extremely unimpressive as a figure for a bug that lead to a data breach at Facebook? Why would any researchers ever go to Facebook first and not e.g. a foreign government that needs info on dissidents? I'm pretty certain that Facebook is making an educated calculus here, but it seems like a flaw like that would be worth at least one engineer's yearly wages..