I think I'm the bounty hunter that got $10 and $50 for two similar bugs. cperciva's summary is accurate in my case. WRT feeling respected, it wasn't an explicit need for me but implicitly it helps a lot that his replies had a few lines of explanation when it was a "no, not a bug" or a borderline decision on how big a bounty. Just as it would if I'd had made the report to a non-bounty FLOSS project.