If you dont get into much of theory and try to consider the practical side of things one thing is evident for me: when you have an overall well optimized site which is out of sandbox and you start bulding good industry related links at a stable pace, it starts to move up in SERPs. What's important is you must be good at distinguishing what's a good link and what's a bad one. I say this because there are lots of i-made-1000+-links-and-my-site-is-nowhere-to-be-found talks out there. One really needs to consider the neigbourhoods their links are coming from...
I personally senselessly trade tons of reciprical links for the sole purpose of increasing my SE rankings Its worked great for years why wouldn't I do it? Although over the past year or so a ton of my sites were sandboxed, but even then I could look back at my older sites sitting pretty with there tons of reciprical links, and know that was most likely the future. But this update has cremed most of my old sites, I do still have some sites that still rank, and find one with lots of recips that still rank pretty regulary. One of my sites that came forward in the update has bunch of coop, lv, and reciprical links, so what does that mean?
I think what it means is 1. this update is not about penalizing reciprocal links (per se) 2. this update is not about penalizing Coop ads 3. this update is not about penalizing LinkVault ads (I don't use them but from what I've been reading LV is doing a fine job of penalizing themselves)