I think you should know the answer better than anyone of us. How is your website doing in terms of traffic and ranking after you got so many links? If it improved, then get more. If not, then cool down and find some higher quality link sources.
I haven't read this whole thread, so maybe this has been said already, but it depends on what the natural development of the site would most likely produce. So if you have a site with 1-10 pages and it gets 30 links a day it might hurt it, but if you have a huge site with thousands of pages with blogs and user generated content I think you'd be fine with 30 links a day.
It depends more on where the links come from than how fast they come in. For instance, when a big brand releases a new product, they gain links in the thousands but Google does not penalize them for it.
That's right. The more quality links to your site, the more traffic you get. The most important thing is the quality of your post, so that the community think it usefull and they will automatic link to you. So that, make the thing that community want for free, they will thank you so much and you will get the quality link by automatically.
That's spot on observation there, and you'd do well to act on that. An empty website is pointless, doesn't matter if it's brand new, visitors won't care and vote with their mouse buttons by clicking away. Better to have a full website than putting one up at all.