Need Advice on Penguin Slapped Site

Hey guys,

I run a web design service, I use to rank top 5 in my <countryname web design> and it brought decent traffic, ever since penguin 1.0 hit, i fell so far off serps, I gave up looking for my site past page 50. I run a one man show operation. Outsource shit when workload gets real, if not I just supply wordpress sites.

Background
Site was made in wordpress, article fed (Autopost once every week) via Article Builder.
SEO-ed via SeNuke by Article Builder.
Continued link building for a while after I hit top 3. Then (I know this was bad) I completely stopped on the SEO, as I got busy with the business coming in.

What i did
I did some changes, took it down actually, replaced the theme with an under construction theme, claiming a revamp on site. It's more than 1 page, still has portfolio, etc.
I took a free trial with LinkResearchTool, found some malicious links.
Downloaded the entire URL list, from webmastertools, fed it into Scrapebox to look for links with high OBL.
Then took a deep dive into WebMaster's disavow link tool.
At this point of time, I kept thinking, fucking manual penalty.
So I submitted a reconsideration request.
WebMasterTools came back, no manual penalty was made. wtf?

I took some time off from the business.

Recently.
After a very long time(Also after penguin 2.0), I realize my site is now on Page 24.
Which I thought, "well okay."

Now.
Confused as F##$, i registered another domain awhile back to move operations over, since from what I've read, its pretty tough to recover from penguin.
Wanted to start anew. SEO Competitor analysis on showed my country's web design companies don't put much focus on SEO. except the top dog. shitload of links, figured I'm good with that.
However, seeing my old domain, appearing again gave me hope.

Question.
Should I go back to my old or new domain?
Any recommended strategies from the veterans here?

I've quite abit of resources at hand, many legit paid softwares, senuke, UD, AMR, scrapebox, seopowersuite, the entire GSA suite, captcha sniper+breaker, traffik buster, a ton of private proxies, etc
I know how to utilize them, except, i don't know what strategy I should go into coming back into the scene now. It's been a year.

It's like having a ton of weaponry to go wage a war except, I have no battle plans.

Any form of advise / scolding / strategy is highly valued.
Guys, I need any help I can get. I'm lost.

Penguin recoveries are few and far between. i'd go for the starting afresh approach

Thanks offwhite, was hoping to see if there's any other suggestions. =\

The strategy that always worked for me is the next one(this depends on your niche):

1. submit articles to networks like designbump, thewebblend, designfloat, chime, etc. and add 6-7 votes per day to each network(2-3 days)

2. get a lot of tweets, fb likes and google votes to your links(to see some results more the 100)

3. post in as many fb groups related to your niche as posible

4. do this 2 per week for 2 weeks

It's very important to do the same amount of work every day, I know it all can be done in one day but don't do it.

I did this for my website and after 2 weeks I got my PR back and a much better SERP position.
I didn't use fb because my domain is marked as spam there and I can't post any link fro that website on fb, but I did a good job my mistake was that I stoped after I got my rank back.

IMPORTANT: Do not create fake accounts in some of the networks, they will get deleted and the link that was submited banned, just one account yours and ask other users to vote for you. That way I build a good list of users that will vote my articles.

Hope this will help you.

I can give you a Very Important advice, Just try it once and you can get great results.

Redirect your Old Domain to your New one.. and let us know result.

for me.. I see only the Article Builder had made this problem. I seem its not penguin but Panda who has pushed u back.. focus on getting unique good written contents. G00gle have a very strong system to recognize synonyms inside the contents. so getting spun content wont work anymore.