If you are willing to wait for a long time, the best thing will come to you. We are not in the project and have no right to interfere with their development. I think if they want to scam people, they don't need to update the announcement but they still do it in March. I am also personally involved in this campaign and will continue to wait until there is the most accurate answer

so how about investor ? the telegram group is not only a bounty participant but also an investor, and also dev has announced that the distribution will be completed by April 20 should it not be a reason to close the telegram group

Token distribution has nothing to do with legitimacy of project. You are right if they had bad intentions they were distributing tokens and disappearing. Any token without development or team has no value except another token in your wallet. We should give wait for things to done as they are comfortable. This is only way as we have no control over the fate of this project.

in my opinion it was very strange, they were worried about something clearly happening. when distribution for bounty is done then dump cannot be avoided, they must be prepared for this condition.

I do not understand how they can be afraid of dumps and if indeed they are afraid they should not hold a bounty so in my opinion this is quite strange but this has also happened

The fact is they are scammer look who merit Athero
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=759298
Which promote HYIP and ICO projects and almost all are scam so it means that Wipro who sent merit to Athero account possible alt account he want to sent Athero to rank up to jr.member to take advantage of enabling images to post to attract more people to invest to their project which is scam.
So those who posting here to defend this project is possible a friend or alt account.

If they really think that bounty hunter can dump Token price by selling after distribution then they should pay in BTC or ETH.
In this way they can easily maintain price of Athero, anyway if project is undervalue and team working hard then Dump will be temporarily.  

almost all projects only pay with tokens and this makes many bounty hunters face many difficulties in liquidity, so choosing USD or ETH can be very good but very few projects have This can be done because the cost is too expensive. In my opinion the best solution is to lock tokens bounty and pay by month then surely THO prices will not panic sell

Yeah it's like delay-dump, and in my opinion the team should be consistent about their decission before, 21 april is the last day of distribution. We're waiting for long time, and if they decide to delay again, really it's not good for this project, not only dump prices but I guess they will lost their investor.

But at least for now, the team should be appear and open the telegram group to clarify this situation, not only community manager but like the CEO, etc.