> from the usual security-asshole to some of the nicest guys ever
It's not clear whether the asshole in question is being dogmatic about some ninety-day disclosure-to-publication deadline or whether they're maybe being rude about the project having security bugs. I have read lots of stories (mostly ones shown here on HN) about knee-jerk overreactions from CIO/CTOs from not-too-large or not-too-technical businesses w/vulnerabilities. Those kind of blame-the-messenger things likely shape their behavior with respect to disclosures.
> The result of that, is that when you don't know how much to award for a security issue (is it medium or low?), you decide on the niceness of the reporter :)
Gee, this sounds like it's not considering the impact to the user. Isn't that the intent of impact ratings? I suppose the risk of misclassification here is wasting the budget of the bounty on low-harm issues or dissuading researchers from digging deeper to find the high-impact ones.