I'm not sure bounties and competition are bad. Right now there is total lack of competition for solving issues, so some incentives to ignite it would be useful IMO.

A simple implementation of nip42 with some fixed set of pre-configured pubkeys doesn't seem too difficult from what I see in the code. The scope of "full support" (relay+sync+stream) mentioned in the github issue plus the desire to make it an extensible plugin might be the thing blocking it.