Actually, it has always been like that. If you had BOINC running on one PC, you had enough research magnitude to receive rewards quite often, even if you had only 200-300 GRC in your wallet. However, if Gridcoin network increases 100x in size, magnitude will get dilluted for everybody and things may yet change.
But on the other hand, rewards are getting bigger - it's possible now (even for home users) to earn close to $1000 per month, solely through running BOINC and mining Gridcoins. Check @xaqfields and his experience:
Nice. Thanks for the info!