Nice share and exactly what i've been seeing the last while. If you want to know what's working then look at what people who are ranked num 1 are doing.
Take any popular clickbank product, look at the top ranking site and how they are ranking. The majority will be using pbns, but if you look closely at the pbns you will see what Pavel is saying is true - Laser targeted content with keywords you want to rank for included in the Title, H1, and throughout the article. It's the reason why pbns are working so well, because most people using them create the posts that link to their sites with their keywords included in these areas without even realizing the importance of it.
I see the many posts popping up here on BHW every second day - My site is stuck on page 2 etc. This is the main reason why. It's a new thing that was introduced with penguin 3 but there seems to be no talk about it here - Topical pagerank.
Google wants you think that what you're doing is working and will let your site climb to the second page, but its not going to get any further than this if you don't follow the advise in this video - Laser targeted content linking to laser targeted content.