GMaxwell, I hope you enjoy your 3 BTC I sent you, courtesy of d'aniel.
$450 to a dick? We need to save the funds better than this. I hope his contribution was valuable. Just because the projects wallet is fat, doesn't mean you have to throw the money around unnecessarily.
Did you know that people consume about 20% more shampoo when their shampoo bottle is full? No need sending BTC to dicks unless their help was a good improvement for the project.
d'aniel earned a bounty very early on for describing a potential attack vector on underfunded escrows. His contribution was very valuable, and led to some changes in the most recent rev of the spec. The fact that he is a detractor doesn't diminish his contribution. d'aniel asked me to send his bounty to GMaxwell, so I did. That bounty was approved by the MasterCoin Foundation board (which was two people, not including myself, at that time).
If we do everything we can to be good block-chain citizens, and if the protocol is successful, some detractors will eventually become advocates. People here can be very passionate and opinionated, but most of them can also be swayed by sound arguments, especially if the argument is in the form of code which is proving useful to lots of people and making bitcoin more valuable.