This has become very much subjective and confusing at the same time.
To summarize what I understood...
1. Bitcoin giveaways are allowed
2. Alt coins giveaways not allowed - OP will get a ban and participants will be banned if posted in ALT section.
3. Low effort tasks/giveaways not allowed any where on the forum - OP and participants will be banned
Now as far as the topic in question is concerned its was BTC giveaway since major portion of the payment was already in BTC which is >83% in BTC and rest <17% in LTC
Now what "Incentivizing posting" rule says, this is what I understand from a quote from theymos
You can do giveaways off-site and link to the giveaway page in a thread, but you can't give people any bonus for replying to your thread.
Now the OP in discussion clearly didn't had any such intention of posting, where a post in a thread makes you eligible of any incentive. It was same like any other signups on the forum you need one post with participants info. Yes you can impose the rule here if you want but that will be unfair to “Bitcoin community”.
Sometimes we need to evaluate the situation differently...
mprep as mod yes you did the right thing from your end since you evaluated the op and the topic from "Alt coins giveaways + low effort task" perspective. But in reality the OP never had any of such intention. His topic was purely for the betterment of “Bitcoin”... he just tried his own way of realizing Elon that what he is portraying against bitcoin is wrong. That's why you see so much sentimental support from bitcointalk members for him.
It's not an argument but you see we don't have 55 millions followers like Elon Musk...even if whole bitcointalk community try to support bitcoin against Elon he can outperform us with a single tweet our total Bitciontalk member are just 3m. So I will say as a bitcoin supporter op did not deserve a ban here.