I agree. The pool of people that could submit code to a project is much larger than the pool of maintainers who could effectively integrate those contributions

I agree. The pool of people that could submit code to a project is much larger than the pool of maintainers who could effectively integrate those contributions. At some point an issues bounty will start wasting everyone's time. It encourages people investing time in contributions without a full understanding of the codebase. This is turns puts pressure on maintainers to keep up in spite of areas they want to work on. And when contributions are are ignored it creates a rift and misplaced ill will.