If you are developing links and following information on this web site you will fail! These are outdated tactics and have a greatly reduced effort during this Panda era. Blog commenting has been spammed to death and there are too many article directories that just rip any rubbish. 2 years ago, using this forum was both fun and informative, but recently it is just putting out stupid old tactics that will not work, so either change the way you do link building or your site is in danger of being left behind in the future panda updates. If you are looking at DP to provide the right answers, you need to look else where, as these out of date answers no longer work.
I would not discredit all article directories. The days of throwing the same article or half a** spinned articles across tons of article directories is dead or dying fast. But, creating unique articles for each directory is something I would suggest still...but, I wouldn't suggest putting a ton of time and money into that link building strategy.
I understand your frustrations and concerns, but could you possibly offer us some other advice? What do you think the best seo options are?
You are correct. This place is nothing more than Noobs asking questions about Old Tactics. Can you believe people are still talking about Directory Submissions? (The oldest of them all) I find myself frustrated when coming here and seeing all these useless posts/questions. They're too lazy to do some reading before asking. Thankfully they're better places to go and discuss the new changes.
Article directories, as you rightly state, pretty much carry no weight these days. It's never been more important to source high quality links, and remember the golden rule "not all links are made equal". A mixture of quality and quantity, along with regularly update content will see you right. Just remember to keep diversifying your link sources. WebDev