“I would be very interested in finding a way to have all the links pages uniformly ranked without having a link to every link page from every site page!”
Have one link page that gets links from other pages on your site. Link to every one of your link pages from that one parent-link page. Dump as much or as little PR into that parent-link page as you want. If you have a few really important links, add them to the parent link page if you want.