That's fine to pay people in Incent, it is normal practice however the norm is to lock-up those shares/tokens to avoid an instant dump. It is irresponsible to investors not to consider it and the excuse of this being crypto is just an excuse.
You are asking for investors but you are not looking in their best interest and not being transparent about it.
When a coin (in this case Incent) is promised to be bought off the market because of an event or anything, something is off. I'm glad I bought at 10k and sold it at 19k just before the beginning of ICO, and washed my hands off this. I had similar experiences with colored coins back in 2014 and I guess my instincts kicked in.
That is the business model. There's nothing untoward about that. It's a perfectly valid approach and lots of businesses use it. In fact it's becoming the norm in crypto due to the regulatory problems involved with issuing dividends. Just because you got burned with colored coins doesn't mean 'something is off'.
Re: locking Incent for partners - as I said, that's problematic. I guess we could have done for the team, though (unsurprisingly) no one from the team has sold. For the PR company, a lock-up period would have been a dealbreaker. Incent is a crypto startup, a high-risk company in a high-risk sector. Who's to guarantee that the Incent would be worth anything at the end of the lock-up period? We might be confident, but they have bills to pay.
That's not to say we aren't very disappointed in the course of action they took.
If it was a dealbreaker from the PR point of view then you should have advised the investors. It was obvious they would sell in that case. Your role is to protect and advise investors in Incent but you don't seem to get it.