One of the reasons for opening a bounty on a question is:
Draw attention
This question has not received enough attention.
I believe this question requesting a console for Stack Snippets has not had sufficient attention. It was posted soon after Stack Snippets went live, and has gone unimplemented for more than a year and a half now. In that time, I've started bounties on it, repeatedly, awarding them when the time came to the best answer I saw there other than my own. The poster of that answer has done the same thing, awarding the bounties to me. (It's not been a continuous thing; a total of three each way over the course of roughly a year.) The fact he/she keeps awarding bounties to me, and I to him/her, has the side-effect, of course, that neither his/her rep nor mine is impacted by the bounties long-term, not that either of us cares. But my reason for awarding to him/her is that for a long time, his/her answer was the only one I thought worthy of a bounty (there's now a second one).
Today, someone posted this comment to the other user and CC'd me:
your "bounty ping pong" with T.J.Crowder can be seen as abusing the bounty system. Neither of you lose any reputation. Please stop.
I don't see any abuse here at all. We both genuinely feel the issue has not had sufficient attention paid to it.
I couldn't care less about MSE rep. I'd be happy to award all my MSE rep to get that feature implemented. I am not awarding bounties to the other guy only on condition he do the same thing. I just want the feature implemented. (So much so that I once emailed Stack Exchange offering to implement it, and several others around Stack Snippets, for free. I got no reply.)
Is this abuse? Or using the "Draw attention" for its intended purpose: Drawing attention?
I'm primarily interested in a statement from Stack Exchange on policy, but apparently the tag support doesn't apply to questions about guidance about using features, so we're stuck with discussion.