Buying links vrs trying all these softwares

Several years ago I was in the link building game to promote my site. I took a few hundred and I bought all the most relevant links I could find from high PR sites (many were one time purchase that I still have today). This got my website ranked as high as PR5 and in the top 10 for many of my keywords. Would this strategy still work and do you think it just might be better and easier than using all these frequently mentioned softwares around here(like SENuke, AMR,SB)?

It really depends. I personally hate backlinking and find it too time consuming to do myself so I purchase services. I rank fine, but mine aren't competitive keywords (2000-3000 exact searches per month).

You can always outsource it as well if you have the patience to train and find someone good.

Hire VAs to do your backlinking. Way cheaper then paying for backlinks. I run hundreds of thousands of blog comments a day. If i were to pay for that, I would be far beyond broke

I guess some information about what I'm trying to do might be helpful. I only own one site thats about 8 years old, in a highly competitive industry of jewelry. So one of my theories is that running all these softwares might work for not-so-competitive type keywords, maybe purchasing high quality, high PR and relevant links might be best? Please correct me if I'm wrong?

Also, a long time ago there was a way to approximately calculate how many PR1 sites a link from a PR5 site would be worth, and so on. Is there any type formula around now? Using this might be able to put all this in perspective. Hypothetically, why waste time and money to build 1,000 PR1 and PR0 links when you could buy a PR5 link that would give you the same boost for $20?!