There could be a few things going on here, maybe your bug was classified as low pri, maybe we misdiagnosed the bug.
Speculation but I would call into question your assertion that we fixed something based on your submission and then attempted to hide/delay it. We have not and would not do such a thing.
We have paid out on such issues before but there is no hard rule. In general we err on paying out if there is any question. We have paid out before when a submission wasn't a bug at all but lead us to some part of the code that we ourselves then found a security bug in.
It is in our best interest to payout whenever possible. More payouts = more submissions = more security bugs found and fixed.
"Sorry it took a while to respond. It took us longer than normal because we have had a few weeks of higher than average volume and this ticket was marked as fixed but we hadn't corresponded back to you yet."
"This was indeed fixed by a separate diff that had been committed but was not yet live when you submitted the issue. So in this case we didn't learn about a new issue but we did double-check some of our assumptions around this stuff."
And I got a reward of $500. Here is the POC http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5HXv7nPgYo