Escrow is good but not a must, you can even miss many good projects if you force escrow on new projects because I've heard few reputable bounty managers complaining that even high quality bounty projects don't want to accept Escrow, the moment they talked about Escrow the team will stop replying and find another bounty manager that don't care about Escrow
That too is very true, but it also depends on the credibility of the bounty manager on these Bitcointalk platform that makes this investors believe in the bounty managers and also allow free flow of communication. Well mostly some excrows can be trickish if they don't have the credibility