Ok, so the Co-op is a marketing tool and not designed for link building. Unfortunately, a very large percentage of users don't look at it that way. My suggestion is to leave the block ads alone but make the text link ads mandatory static links. Since nobody could possibly use text links for traffic purposes with the Co-op, at least let people get more seo benefit from it. Also, having categories from which to display or run ads would help both from an seo and a marketing standpoint.
Sorry... not going to happen. If you are looking to gain links/PageRank and all that, there are other systems that are geared towards that (Link Vault for example).
I get more direct traffic from tha coop than I do from any combination of 20 directories - including dmoz
Dang it! And here I thought my recent directory submissions would result in 10million visitors next month