This is the longest bounty I have participated in.. I thought it will never end.
It seems to me there's a difference between the bounty program and the bounty contest. Bounty participants on bitcointalk may just get a larger percentage of the allocation I think. Also, few people participated in the different bounties on here, so that also implies less people to share from the number of tokens allocated and more value in ETH for the participants. I might be wrong though
I expect them to allocate the 3% bounty pool as outlined in the official post with the adjusted token metrics and as confirmed by the OPEN team. Signature campaigns are the most profitable campaigns in 99% of the ICOs. You can only do one at a time, and if it takes more than half a year you can't participate in those hundreds of other campaigns that might also pay well. On the contrary, every bounty contest participant could have also participated in the signature campaign or any other signature campaign they like. I did my research very thoroughly and sticked to this for the whole distance while looking at other well paying campaigns, too. To be honest, I knew this was going to be huge and once the team confirmed the payouts will happen as initially promised plus adjustment for the new terms, I felt I did a pretty good job studying dozens of white papers and making my next pick for a sig campaign. The space is tough to analyze because of the sheer mass, but sticking with strong infrastructure projects like OPEN is a good strategy for bounty people. Not many understand that though. Most people prefer those application things running on top of blockchains.
As for the payouts, I am also a little bit shocked by the expectations of bounty contest participants. If there are a hundred thousand people, what do they think they could get in bounty rewards? Imagine even if they paid $3 million to the bounty contest, that would be $30 on average. It's helpful to do the maths on the terms officially provided by the OPEN team and adjust your expectations accordingly. Not sure if anyone really did that. I did!