I'm aware of the unclaimed funds: I don't tend to forget such sums of money, especially when they've appreciated like BTS has since they were allocated. My intent for the usage of the funds remains unchanged from my previous statements about it: I'll draw upon them for work I think especially important to the future of the chain.
... I plan to involve some of our engineers in development work prior to that time (I introduced the guys to the concepts of UIAs, for example, yesterday).
Thanks for the clarification and contributions.
One thing I would like to see now and would be willing to fund for a reasonable price from the allocated funds: an onchain or offchain solution to the bug where the vote counts aren't available for committee members that aren't presently elected. To me this seems like a distinct weakness in the governance system.
There is an github issue for this:
https://github.com/bitshares/bitshares-core/issues/987, actually I've got an idea about how to fix it just a few days before, although not yet started to code, due to priority. It's also good if someone else can get it fixed. However, IMHO, efforts related to this issue can be covered by the core dev worker if there isn't a dedicated bounty for it.
Back to the topic, 7 million BTS seems a bit too huge in comparison to such small bounties. Now we already have a core dev worker to cover the maintenance job which was intention of this worker. Since we haven't yet decided how to use this fund, given the fact that most workers on chain now are being paid via escrows, I propose that we move the remaining funds of this worker to be controlled by an escrow service (for example BBF) or merge it with the core dev worker, if we still want to use it to fund core development / maintenance. We do want experienced project manager and developers to help and contribute, not only funds. On the other hand, if we're going to use it to fund other things, which would be out of this worker's scope, IMHO it's best to re-vote.