When people offer advice here, im pretty sure it's based on their own success with the advice given. Certain methods will work for some people, but not for others. For example, you stated that you ranked a site well by blasting thousands of links at it - For most people, that just leads to short term rankings followed by a penalty, but you were among the small percentile of people to see longer success with it. Given that, if you opened a thread that told everyone that blasting thousands of links is a good way to rank long term, you'll probably get a lot of hate comments, even though it worked for you. This is because it doesn't work for most people.
The best we can all do is try to follow the guidelines that work for people most of the time, even if not all the time, and throw our own flavors along the way to try and land on something that really works.
