I love wedding announcements.
It tells me what name the bride plans to use, where they will be living, and in some cases does make me aware of the wedding. I've had friends who eloped to Hawaii, second cousins who had a low key immediate family only wedding, and an ex co-worker who married her live in SO of 10 years in a JP mid week wedding. In all 3 of those cases I learned of the event through the announcement.
I much prefer the card versus a FB post or hearing about it via word of mouth.
I feel no more pressure about gift giving based on an announcement of a wedding than I do for a card letting me know a friend has moved.
If someone expects a gift based on an announcement from me and gets upset because I don't send one then that's their issue, not mine. There is no social rule saying a gift is required.
I feel the same way that you do, hmmmm. But the bolded is where people get into trouble.
Yes, absolutely, the etiquette rule is that announcements are perfectly proper and do not obligate the recipient to send a gift. And yes, absolutely, the logical inference is that therefore the recipient should not see an announcement as a bid for a gift or attention or any other improper purpose.
I agree with all that 100%.
However.
The OP is wondering what kind of impression sending announcements will have. We aren't the ones she's sending them too, so it doesn't matter that WE get it. And she cannot control whether people know the above, or whether, even if they do, they will nevertheless question her motives or think it looks off in some way.
It's easy enough to say that if others are bothered, that "that's their issue." But all that does is assign the blame. If your goal is to avoid creating a negative impression, not just to be secure in the knowledge that you are blameless if you do, then the rules just don't answer the question of what to do.
Like, say, if you refuse to use the response card enclosed with a wedding invitation, and instead, on your personal letter paper, in black or blue-black ink, with the lines centered, write "Mr. and Mrs. Smith/accept the kind invitation/of/Mr. and Mrs. Jones/for April 32, 2015," you are perfectly -- indeed, excruciatingly, as Miss Manners puts it -- correct. So if the recipients think you are being pretentious and flaunting your superior knowledge of etiquette and probably looking down on them for their incorrect inclusion of the response cards in the first place -- well, "that's their issue." But if they do, they do, and there isn't anything you can do about it.
Same here. I know the rules, and I get the advantages, and I know that anyone receiving an announcement about our daughter's upcoming wedding "shouldn't" feel it is a bid for a gift or attention or a "nyah-nyah this happened and you weren't invited." But given how rare announcements are these days, and the many other ways people now have of hearing about such news, and given that it isn't to be a tiny-tiny family only wedding, I wouldn't blame them if they wondered about our motives. So we aren't sending them.