deadwood has proposed a number of bounties, among others exclusively for aros68k. what would be his interest to propose those, if he was not intending to eventually pick them up? i mean, im not sure, but he likely is like most aros developers, mainly an x86/x64 user. its unlikely that he needs that endian fix himself...
what you say is the basic problem of the bounties, users will not donate if a trustworthy developer doesnt volunteer in advance. developers dont know how high the interest of users is. both is understandable. but someone tries to estimate interest, good thing would be to speak up, if you want it to take off.
some trustworthy site like people2power should have polls to estimate such bounty interest in advance to actually tarting them.