People often ignore certain correlations when they're in panic mode.
Most people (not everyone) use SAPE links on sites that they don't care too much about because they understand the risks involved. In other words, they usually don't use it on their primary money maker.
Has it ever occurred that maybe these sites got hit because they are sites that people didn't care too much about and perhaps lower quality too? It's easy to jump and say that SAPE is responsible, but what about all the other factors?
I just ordered SAPE links for the first time on one of my churn and burn sites (it's got plenty of other reasons to get slapped, that's why its a churn and burn site). I don't have results for it yet because the links are still being processed, but what I noticed from this update is that most of my experimental sites got slapped while the sites I paid more attention to increased in rankings.
Now if I had used SAPE on all these experimental sites and they got slapped, I could also make the assumption that SAPE was responsible, but I would be so wrong.
If all your SAPE sites got slapped and your non SAPE sites didn't, it doesn't mean SAPE is responsible. It could, but it could also be because all these sites shared something else in common. (ex. all these sites could have had more aggressive link building in general, badly spun backlink content, low content, etc.)