Seeing a pattern

All the back and forth comes from the Value of specific kinds of links and their perception of them. What works on one site may not work for another. This is why I say all links are good in the proper amount. (Proper amount = Site specific and another huge discussion) There is also all the plans from a basic I have one site and promote it, to the 1000 site link wheel/hub on seven tiers feeding my money site. I tend to keep things simple but those people who spend six months building a wondrous complex of sites swear by them and I wont tell them they are wrong. I just wonder if the swear by them in order to justify it while I spent a week to get up and running and the next 6 months making my money site better and converting? This topic will never end and when we one day come close to a unified theory the search engines will change the rules again so we have to start over again.

It is complicated because you want to get a lot of backlinks and you want to focus also on the authority/power of the sites and pages you create your links on rather than just dumping thousands of low quality links. Some things to take into account when determining the strength of a backlink:

Low OBL (outbound links) - try to get your links on pages with no to few other links already placed on them
Contextual - try to get your links within an article or some text related to your site rather than just dumping a plain link somewhere
Relevance - try to get links form other pages/sites in the same niche/topic as your site
Anchor Text - rather than just a link try to get good anchor text, the clickable word your link is tied to, use a few words/phrases that relate to terms you're targetting and also mix in natural anchors like "click here" "here" "site" etc.
Authority of site/page - obviously a link coming from a site like harvard.edu will carry more strength than a site like dog-lipstick-colors.blogspot.com you can also guage this somewhat by looking at PR and Alexa rank with any one of many toolbars
Appear Natural - don't dump a gazillion links in one day on a new site, try to get links from many different platforms instead of just doing blog comments, or just doing profiles, etc. Also although ******** are certainly better a little bit than NoFollow get both and vary it up. Appearing natural is even more important in a post Penguin Google.

Basically just read up on SEO and you'll figure it out quickly. It is a never ending process both to reach the position you're trying to achieve and to hold your place there.

so it is simply just a numbers game with a puzzle twist? well, and with the added factor of the danger of being flagged for spam..

just always look natural...

Yes, its like a puzzle game. But we all know that Google don't like the tools. but most of the high paying tools are giving results right? So Spamming is not liked by Google but if you can do it properly and at a right quantity then you will definitely get benefit. and will be always ahead than your competitors.