I totally agree – Joel is a great guy and I have found him to possess a great deal of integrity, and I’ll still tell him LM is a lazy mans tool! (Joel runs a very well known portal – some of you may know him.)
And yes, I have always updated manually too – and its a real bitch the more sites you have, but I think if you want to work hard at maintaining it you will reap the rewards. With that said I believe there was a period of at least six months where all I did was ignore link request all together – I didnt have time to update dozens of links on dozens of sites. I was the perfect candidate for LM, but IMHO I always thought the minuses outweighed the pluses. To this day I still hard code ALL links on ALL sites!
YES & YES/no
The primary goal should still be creating a quality site, however with that said I know a lot of webmasters could careless about quality – they’d just assume put up 2000 websites – 98% duplicated – and wait for the trap to spring. (To each his own.) Regarding linking – it’s awful to say, but in order to keep pace with the Jones’s you have to join in the masquerade to some extent. I just recently started exchanging home page links on a few of my sites – I felt this was necessary in order to maintain myself.
Sweep the dust under the rug …