Completely in support of a separate tutorial section. The only thing I think you need to watch our for would be people making multiple tutorials, to solve this you could make the title a search on the Tutorial section so the user can see if the topic was already covered and hopefully they would just add to that specific post if needed, instead of making a whole new post. I would also, be cautious of any sort of incentivization that makes it like a contest, this might encourage duplicate tutorials or poorly written ones; that said I do think a badge could be cool.
Another call out would be to build something like an archive for out of data tutorials, if enough people vote that a tutorial is out of date it would be archived so we are not confusing new users. The issue with documentation is that is has to be maintained and no one likes documentation (or does it) so I think this would be critical in keeping the tutorial section clean. This system would allow some sort of community regulation and to prevent abuse maybe when the post is flagged X number of times it gets sent to mods for review before being archived; ideally this would keep the management time spent on it small so it's not pulling resources from other more important things.