was it not pointed out months ago that all you need to do if fill in a few forms, and Azure will add you?
As far as I know - yes.
It worked for pumping coins for a while, until people found out that it is essentially meaningless!
I don't think that this is their intention. Viacoin was never been hyped (at least by their "team" (I am putting quotation marks, because unfortunately currently VIA barely has a team)). Just wanted to give some publicity to a coin, which was forgotten for quite some time, but the developer is still active.
P.S. I do not own any VIA, thought I had like 130k before 1-2 years.