This is really interesting, and I'm glad it resurfaced for those of us who weren't here last year. I tried Adwords last night, thought I'd dabble in it after launching a successful PPC campaign with a smaller network, but I just got blown away by the learning curve. Increase your quality score to lower your CPC? Huh? So, basically, I have to create a different landing page for each ad, to make sure the keywords, ad copy and landing page are all optimized for the same keywords, rather than use the existing landing pages I have. Seems like a lot of work to get to pay Google money, but I'll give it a shot.
I've read the whole thread. It seems there are really bad guys in Google. It is amazing there are a lot of search engines which are better than google, but because of some unclear reason google is the most popular one.
Google staff seems to have a very high turn over in positions. Perhaps if you don't like the answer you get you can resubmit and hope for the luck of the draw.
It is generally disliked when someone resurrects a thread that is well over a year old. This time, however, I am glad that you did because there is some great information here.