The idea of using bounties to compensate contributors is intriguing. These are quite popular and very successfully used by Google, FB, MS and others especially when looking for vulnerabilities in product. Less familiar with bounties being used to develop features, functionality, or even fix bugs but I can see the appeal.
I think bounties would work better if we have a few from time to time rather than have more than a couple of them run simultaneously. So not everything we need from contributors may lend itself to be done via bounties. Which is why I’m less sure about bounties completely replacing the need for paid contributors.
Could we come up with some concrete examples of what might make sense for a bounty and estimate the bounty we should have? One area I feel we could try to get help via a bounty is adding more GraphQL feature support, which we’ve spread over several releases.