I reject the claim that your rephrasing is the "real" question being asked.

That multiple different people automatically treated hen's question like it were my rephrasing backs me up on this one, I reckon.

By rephrasing the question, you are rejecting it just as much as Anatoly. I think it is more accurate to say that you evade the question, while he is up front about rejecting it.

Rephrasing a question can be the first step to confronting it head-on rather than rejecting it. If a tourist, looking for the nearest train station, wandered up to me and asked, "where station is the?", and I rearranged their question to the parseable "where is the station?" and answered that, I wouldn't say I rejected or evaded their query.