I had a site with roughly the same stats as you. I blasted for a good month straight direct linking. I blasted roughly 5-10 pages all with different keywords. I created roughly 20k new links according to Yahoo Site Explorer at the time, and that's just how many YSE picked up, in reality there were many many more since they just weren't indexed.
In short I say do it, my site bounced all over the place for around 2-3 months and for 2 of those months it completely disappeared. I stopped building links to it since I was discouraged. Then one day I started getting emails of affiliate commission sales, I checked the site and it came back, and came back strong. I'm now sitting in the top 5 spots with all of the pages and with all of the keywords I was targeting.
Here is why I love SEO. People say don't blast it, the links are of bad quality, too many links too fast, inconsistent build rate of the links, I also stopped after the site dropped, they were all blog comment links too.
Tell me how many "rules" I broke but I don't care, what matters is my rankings and right now my site is sitting pretty among stiff competition.