Paying $1,000 for low-impact issues is a nice move which might make me contribute to their program again.

A "major evolution" would be for Apple to have informative two-way conversations with security researchers and to stop stiffing them for reports.

I submitted a few macOS reports to the program, but Apple just sat on them forever, sometimes years, until I got frustrated enough to just publicly disclose the bugs. Needless to say, Apple never paid me a dime. For that reason, I don't actively look for macOS bugs anymore, and if I happen to find anything by accident, I'll just 0day.

I think that demanding full exploit chains is an excuse to ignore bugs and to discourage researchers from reporting them. What if a full exploit chain exists, but the links of the chain are known by different researchers? The researchers are incentivized to withhold bug reports without the full chain, and meanwhile an attacker who happens to have the full chain won't withhold their attack. Apple is practically making the black market for bugs more valuable.

It's basically the same as Apple demanding a sysdiagnose before they'll even look at a non-security bug report. Typo in the developer documentation? Please attach a sysdiagnose! It's ridiculous.