I'd add that it is very possible to even do whitehat with Scrapebox and in your case as you asked niche specific link building. Basically you can search for niche blogs and filter out the ones you can post on and do the posting manually. How more whitehat can you get?
Scrapebox has the addon "link extractor" where you can get every page on that website, and also has the addon to check the PR of each link and also for domain.
Depends entirely on the person using it. If you're using it for white hat methods, it's highly effective. If you take a little time you can generate a large list of high quality blogs, with low outbound links, high PR, and that are related to your niche. If you're willing to learn, then you should definitely invest in it. Anyone who thinks Scrapebox is simply for spam simply doesn't understand how many things you can do with the software.
Yeah I agree. Scrapebox is useful for so much. I do lots of whitehat stuff with it. Just because it automates some tasks doesn't mean its black hat. I think people get confused and assume that any program that automates stuff is blackhat. Automation is not blackhat, Spam is blackhat.