Hi Roderick,
From my point of view the bounty system is a wishing well.
You are correct. But it was created more or less to be exactly like that.
It was never intended to be used for "professional" sponsoring with companies and contract things.
That is full time work. Nick also made a rough estimate and its not a small project!
Then it is perhaps not suited for the bounty system!
Hence the thing with these projects you need much more money to then lets say 10 years back. The bounty system does not seem to achieve critical mass to get that money. Also the price tag of Russian and Ukraine developers have gone up. And they have of course every right since they are extremely skilled.
Well, heck. The bounty system cannot create that critical mass, because for such a mass of money it would need features to control the delivery which are not available with the bounty system. What that means is: People will not invest LARGE amounts of money because the bounty system doesn't provide the TRUST that "you get what you pay for". There is no guarantee. There is no "what if" rules covered.
In all, the bounty system lacks things that people need for investing into professional project funding.
But: It lacks that because it wasn't built for that purpose.
What we can think about is:
- Set up a project managing like with Qt4
- We will encourage people to send the money to that project (like Qt4)
- We will ask the sponsor(s) of the current bounty here if os2world is allowed to shift the money to that new project
Then, no more argueing about the bounty system. "Obtaining the critical mass" will then be on your side of the fence.

About russian developers:
Yeah, yeah, bla bla... they are extremely skilled. Sure. But if they are too hard to handle and can't live to their promise (regardless how skilled they are) it's worth nothing. I'm sure we can find equally skilled developers in say Romania, Bulgaria, heck, the Faroer Islands if you want. You don't have to stick with Russia if they are not worth their price tag in the end.
I agree that "you get what you pay for": Pay peanuts and you'll get monkeys. But what is the benefit of paying MORE to get BETTER people but in the end, you never know IF or WHEN you get your code??
From my offshore / outsourcing experience I can tell you there are two ways that work:
1) Get your "cheap" workers colocated HERE to guide them (heck, yes: sit next to them and CONTROL them)
2) Leave them over in their country but tell them about FINES that apply if they don't live up to the agreed scope of delivery and timelines
(And get a lawyer that kicks their ass if they don't seem to take work orders and contracts for serious... )
Everything else - sadly enough - is romantic idiotism.
[ This was a free advice from someone who works in offshore software projects since a couple of years. ]
Cheers,
Thomas