I don't agree. It all depends on what niche you are working on and how much you got power to dominate. It's a game. In my point of view there is no point even bother with whitehat seo ? What really is it ? lol ?
Following web masters guidelines? Just look up your competitor sites and you will see how many of them really follow webmaster guidance aka so called whitehat. I used to use scrapebox for blog comment blasting but now for scraping and all the other things. People say scrapebox died nah ...i guess they are not just capable how to use and what kind of things it can be done ? That is exactly like similar to this question. I am on multiple niches and all i do is testing different strategies and if something works i do apply to my money site.
Google has been increasing indexing time ratio often..that being said it doesn't mean its no way to rank..Also SEO changes it's like our life... I have seen many failur people and claiming its hard to win seo game ....today also some people saying while others getting great results with seo.
I am spending over $400 for all the captchas , proxies , serengines , gsa ser servers etc and i am earning 700% ROI along with few sites....so i can't say its not a worth shot.
I don't like FB or others...but i like to rank fb fan pages
Follow/ spyt test and apply.
SEO or IM not for lazy people or hypers

Work hard.
Cheers!