After squidoo was slapped it becam a lot harder to rank. It requires a lot more content and relevance. Hubpages get ranked a lot faster and better to me.
I have over 170 lenses on squidoo now and I'm starting to see that. Piece of crap, I spent hours and hours on it. Haven't built a lens in a few weeks now because it really just isn't worth my time anymore.
Squidoo rankings are unstable. I created a lens on a decent long-tail keyword and it got to the front page of Google within 2 hours! Next day, nowhere to be seen and it's been ranking all over the place since. I think that HubPages could rank better because they have a hubscore system by where you need a certain score to get your links have nofollow removed. Squidoo, all links are dofollow so maybe the search engines prefer HubPages approach?