You’re all forgetting that google suffered a lot of criticism after panda 1.0, because several consensus high-quality sites (like eHow.co.uk and others) were badly damaged. I didn’t find the original reference I read on his blog, but Matt Cutts clearly indicated that future panda will be fine tuned to filter the valuable article-sites so they won’t be further affected.
After that comment, I made sure I would do an extensive research on any article-site I plan on submitting in. I not only check sites’ classic SEO parameters (SERP ranking, PR, longevity & many many more) but also carefully browse through users lists & published submissions.
If the site itself still ranks high, has a considerable proportion of certified users (official representative of a real brand), and most improtantly – no obvious spam is found, I think it’s still safe to submit an article. Let’s face it – those sites are some of the most accessible sources for link-building, and it would be hard to give up on them altogether.
On the practical perspective – I’ve been applying this method for a long time now and I can say it definitely works!