In general if your content is white hat there is really no problem to get 10k links during 1 day or 100k as it would be easy for your competition to take you out of business if it would get you banned or anything negative.
But one thing that I see as a good result is consistency. so if you build 1000 links today, you better think how you can continue to build 1000 links / day or you can get sandboxed for a while, or you can get temporary bad ranking, but it will always stabilize after a while.
That is what I look at, if the project is important enough for me so it is worth keeping it high ranked, I value how much time I want to put on the project each day and go from there, if I can build 1000 links during 1 hour of work with help of some bot then I go for 1000 links / day. but if I am only willing to put the initial time and then forget about the page I usually build anything from 100-1000 links once and forget about it simply.
Kandor