>That said, we will consider level of effort as a component of our judging process when determining eligibility and bounty size.
I hope for your sake that you do, but just to be clear I don't think anyone in this thread is too concerned about whether you pay out the bounty or not. You can be as loose or as tight with your money as you'd like :)
The concern is from the point of view of the maintainers who will receive spam PRs / patches. Even if you don't pay out for that contribution, it will not unsend the PR / patch in the maintainer's mailbox.