It has always been low income. The bottom idea was to cover costs and buy you a couple of beers per week max. It's sad we don't even get there.
The "get mining get rich" mindset was born because of the guys CPU-mining BTC when a pizza was worth 10kBTC, or GPU-mining them when they were 1$ each. Those guys were doing the right thing at the right time, not exactly obvious!
Those were my thoughts aswell. Because looking throo the forums, all people moaning about non-profitable mining should look at the bigger picture, not just at super profitable times. Sure they came and probably will come again, because I belive GPU/CPU mining is still the most important and it "recruits" much more people into mining, either with 1 GPU or 100 GPUs.
The only problem I see is that there are so many coins out there and people are jumping from one to another, when in times like these we should look for "diamonds" in this mass of coins and secure their networks together. In the long run this should pay of the most, as these coins would become more diversified and thus rare to obtain.
I am only saying this because I still remember when everyone mostly mined LTC and it had the biggest network hashrate just by mining with GPUs. Now all this GPU power is pointed at multiple coins, while we should concentrate it only at one, mostly two.