A few years ago it was always a rule not to have to many links on your site map page? maybe up to 100 links maximum? Is this still the case nowadays? I have a site map with about 550 entries? i dont want to create a xml site map as i have had very bad experiences with them so im going back old school and having a static html page with all my links ... so how many links can i place on my page?
According to Google, a reasonable number would be 100. However, my main page contains over 1400 static links and Google indexes my pages (without a sitemap) just fine.
I think the notion of a certain number of links may be a bit out dated. I think this post from Matt Cutts blog does a good job explaining. What I got from it was limiting the number of link per page is mainly for your visitors. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-many-links-per-page/
The more outgoing links you have from a page the harder it will be to have a higher pagerank. Your assumptions are still true, better to put up a few good links than just any old links. You could take advantage of the "nofollow" attribute though to stop spilling the link juice.
using nofollow on a sitemap? what purpose a sitemap would serve then? the whole idea behind a sitemap is to let google follow the links on the sitemap and index them.