I love seeing these panda update posts lol.I have blasted ,oh,probably 750k of links at one site,works great.Of course nowhere near that many backlinks will be found but my point is this.Blast away at a real business site and it will only help,blast away at affiliate link filled sites and there MAY be issues.I'd say the panda update was more getting rid of sites with affil or clickbank link sites than real business sites.
I only deal with business sites with no links to any affiliate,clickbank or similar sites and only see increases in serps.I got a site on page one with 3.5 mill pages,high pr (newspapers,BBC site etc) competition with scrapebox and AMR.The site is pr N\A so ,yes,blasting still works great.There is 60k searches a month,I don't really know if thats alot or not I just focus on my goal,page one.
Fact is what links building strategies are there,progile,comments,pyramid,guest posting,bookmarking,after that it gets complicated.The site is 4 months old.It even ranks on bing which is notorious for hating new sites.
You have to be realistic.Someone in seo! lol,wanted me to rank then for local seo, the top site(local keyword,e.g city seo) had 350k of links(profile,spam he\she knows the game),that's a lost cause so I told him it'd take a long time to topple that and to forget it.The fact he came to me was a worry anyway if he does seo,I recommended adwords,said he couldn't afford it so I said in that case you haven't a hope in hell of affording me anyway,adios!
Again search and you'll find this as been asked several times.