Why do you think reciprocal links get punished. I did organic reciprocal links last year and our site were stable and grew steadily.
Reciprocal links are not "punished" (penalized), but link schemes are not usually taken into account (links are worth nothing).
Google will reduce the juice flowing from links they know are paid. But if you are smart about where you buy links, there's no way they can possibly know about it. They want to ban paid links, but its just not possible unless the link buyers/sellers are not being discreet. Whether they admit it or not, most "famous" SEOs buy links even to this day. Personally, I don't do link buys right now because I don't have sites that need it at the moment. But I have in the past and will in the future.
If either you or anyone buy a link through this forum, how does Google can detect it as a paid link or not? I believe that Google's system is unable detects all links as paid link or not.