Your assessment is correct. Answers added before a bounty started are not eligible for the automatic award of half the points. This bounty's rep, like that of the previous, will disappear into the aether unless you manually award it.

It's frustrating to spend a lot of rep and not get a useful answer. Nevertheless, the bounty system was never intended to let you buy an answer; bounties buy attention. It's been moderately successful in that regard: the very conservative view counter reports that your question has been read a few hundred times.

Your concern about an "unworthy" answer receiving an automatic bounty is understandable. If it makes you feel any better, when bounties are auto-awarded, the tooltip on the receiving answer's blue bounty box shows the awarder as Community, as opposed to the bounty starter.

Besides, there are three days left in the bounty period, and you never know - someone might be hard at work on an answer for you as we speak.

Your assessment is correct. Answers added before the current bounty started are not eligible for the automatic award of half the bounty's points. This one's rep, like that of the previous, will disappear into the aether unless you manually award it.

It's frustrating to spend a lot of rep and not get a useful answer. Nevertheless, the bounty system was never intended to let you buy an answer; bounties buy attention. It's been moderately successful in that regard: the very conservative view counter reports that your question has been read a few hundred times.

Your concern about an "unworthy" answer receiving an automatic bounty is understandable. If it makes you feel any better, when bounties are auto-awarded, the tooltip on the receiving answer's blue bounty box shows the awarder as Community, as opposed to the bounty starter.

Besides, there are three days left in the bounty period, and you never know - someone might be hard at work on an answer for you as we speak.