This is a trend that happens a lot with bounty campaigns this days for blockchain projects, the truth is if a project doesn't meet its hardcap it is almost impossible to pay out the entirety of the bounty budget.
I think a change of approach should be adopted, projects should have a bounty budget that they will be capable of paying as long as the soft cap is reached.
This may mean a smaller budget but it also ensures hunters don't just join out of greed and spam repeatedly.
At the end everyone is happy
I've experience a bounty where they are not following their own rules. In their bitcointalk thread, they've set a bounty allocation pool but in the counting of stakes, the bounty manager said that the percentage is already included in the stakes so everyone even with different campaign have the same equivalent stakes. I think it is a form of scam.