Long time ago, it was customary to use a lot of the domain name, as the primary key. example key, ice cream ice-cream.com/ice-cream-today but today the things have changed. search engines like google, less take consideration the domain names. especially if you aim to do seo. here is a possible solution icecr.com / ice-cream or 2iiic.com/list-of-ice-cream and this is due to the fact that 100% of the words-domain are now occupied or for sale at absurd prices. google is trying to remedy the problem. it giving chanche at the tag title rather than the domain name. isn't a problem if you not have key in your domain name.
EMD is still most of the time much preferred, but not for the reasons it was few years back. It's just that EMD pretty much tells right off what the site is about, and is most of the time easier to remember.
I also think that with an EMD you can get away with the keyword as anchor text since it is your domain name...
However, EMD is still effective, the thing is you need to perform quality work.. I see lots of EMDs are still ranking well.
EMD's are and will pretty much always be the best option for websites, but not for the reason they used to be.
EMD is still effective, and a great opportunity to rank for a keyword by using the domain name as anchor text, it's just not as effective for a site with thin and bad quality content. I got hit with this creating a whole bunch of microniche sites (total cost after SEO was $50 per site, so you can imagine the content on them) to test if i could get them ranked, and I did, until Sept last year when the change was made to the algo. Since then have refreshed some of the sites with better content and they are right back up there...... anyways, what i'm getting at here is, EMD is still good if you can get it, if not, don't worry it'll just be a little bit of extra work