Much of it depends on your goals too, in terms of which search engine you want to do well in. And there are also exceptions to all rules. I don’t mean to be cryptic, but I don’t think there’s ONE right answer to how you should go about your linking strategy.
My personal line of thinking nowadays is to do what’s good for the user and let the search engines worry about the ranking stuff. If I build a useful site with unique content that links to other quality resources of interest to my user, and I don’t rank well, then that’s the search engine’s mistake, not mine. I didn’t always think that way, but I think it’s a good way to go nowadays.