Is this your personal opinion how you look into it or there are a clear direction from forum moderation board and theymos - are you acting on behalf of the entire staffs?
A bit of both. Incentivized posting in specific threads in exchange for BTC is
usually (I'll come back to that) restricted to Games and Rounds. If someone reported an ANN thread that was involved in an incentivized posting campaign, I'd probably move it to Games and Rounds and have seen similar things done by other moderators. What the consensus is I don't know - as with all rules on Bitcointalk, there's a ton of gray areas and different enforcement by different moderators.
So far except you and icopress is interpreting it other way round where seven of us (Coyster, BlackHatCoiner, tranthidung, Bttzed03, BlackHatCoiner, LoyceV and me) think it's not going to apply the rule that was specifically declared for Alternate cryptocurrencies sections and insubstantial posts that encourage spam in an usual giveaway thread we used to see. Those were like post your username and we will award you some pointless tokens. Frankly speaking you can not tell any of us who thinks it's just fine are not familiar with forum standard and rules. It's now 7 against 2 LOL
Neither of whom are moderators. What you (and those 6 other users) are interpreting is an "unofficial list" maintained by me at my own initiative and on my own free time that (by it's own admission at the very top) is "meant to serve as a reference/educational/informational thread, NOT a rock solid list of rules". The entire reason as to why that thread exists is written down at the top as well (additional emphasis added by me):
Recently I noticed that a lot of new members don't know all the rules and I don't (usually) blame them since not all rules are written and even those written down can be overlooked by users who don't pay much attention to some stickies in select boards
Besides, we have already seen many services (several mixers and even those 1Xbdt scammers too) paid for genuine feedback to improve their service, isn't that creating a conflict, a conflict of standard that you just explained? What do you suggest if a bitcoin service genuinely wants to take community inputs and discuss to improve their user experience? I hope you are not saying that no we do not need any bitcoin service, just hold what you have and let bitcoin be lost in the wallets. Or I am an alien from the spaceship trying to read your old school signals but struggling to figure it out before eventually invading the bitcoin community? :-D
Coming back to that "usually", now if you were to pay for feedback about your site, you can argue that what you are paying for is more akin to a service rather than a giveaway / game / raffle / etc. In that case, a thread in Services that collects said feedback and pays out for said feedback in BTC is probably on topic (as long as it isn't trying to circumvent the rules with the feedback being just the word "good" or "bad"). However, asking for that feedback to be posted on an ANN thread seems more like a ploy to pump up the ANN thread with activity / posts rather than a legitimate attempt at getting constructive feedback.