If you think of bounties are pure transference of reputation... its meaningless.

One of the purposes of bounties is to *get attention*. Some users spend bounties to try to bring attention to a pet cause they feel is neglected. Others actually want to bring attention and reward a great answer. 

There's no guaranteed way to get an official answer - a few people insist on them, but frankly, its probably not possible *all the time* and a lot of authoritative answers come from *users* simply because SE's got a lot of quirks that are more community than platform based. 

That said, I'm pretty sure folks *read* meta and stuff probably gets discussed at some point. I've had feature requests get fulfilled significant periods of time after asking, with no real feedback.