Anyone claiming it is no good or does not work is simply mis-informed or trying to deceive you. This much has been shown time and time again over the 2 years it has been on the market.
Pre and post penguin or panda is absolutely irrelevant, if anyone took the time to look into it it would be incredibly obvious that it works AND can be effective.
Also those saying it only does blog comments are wrong, there are 32 platforms currently in and the whole tool has been going through the biggest change over the last couple of months. If you were to look at the update log for the past couple of months I am sure most of the naysayers woul be really surprised at how many features and platforms have been added. NHSEO is constantly being developed.
The problem is when Penguin was released Matt Cutts put that example of keyword stuffing and some people saw this as an example that NHSEO was not going to be effective again, well since then obviously people are still using it (myself included) and are still seeing their rankings maintain or improve. Keyword stuffing is not in any way related to anything that NHSEO does.
There are every control you could need to get quality relevant links and once you have it setup it can literally run endlessly generating as many links as you want, PR5 links are quite common and I, and other users, have even had PR8 links so anyone saying the links are garbage are just clueless.