Your original post is a bit misleading. Having more than 35 links on a page doesn’t automatically make that a bad page, Google’s guidelines say to keep to under 100 links on a page BTW. You can just go into Yahoo’s directory and see how many links are on some of those pages for proof that it’s not an altruism. Yes, less is more in terms of link power, but not all links are equal. If you are 1 of 100 links on a good authority website that is highly related and a PR5 page, that link will return much more value than if you are the only link on a not so related PR1 page.
It’s hard to imagine that linking will ever go away as it is one of the better measures for the popularity/importance of a website. More likely certain links will be more and more discounted, as has already started happening by Google attacking what they think are paid links.
Nice tool though, thanks for the link. Been looking for one of these since the old bad neighborhood checkers went away.