Marc, that is an amazing post! You made very good points and communicated it very well.
I do everything by hand and a free site takes on average 4-5 hours to get out there. I get the best content I can from sponsors and am trying to weed out the sponsors that won't supply good fresh content. I size and thumb all the content by hand one picture at a time. Our free site designs are well thought out from title to design, colours we use and building the pages. I have even skimmed down my list of LL I submit to so I am only submitting to the ones that give us significant traffic and eliminate the LL owners that are frowned upon by trusted board members.
You make very good points about people cutting corners and when I surf some of the link lists I am amazed to see some of the shit that gets listed. I understand that as a LL owner you need lots of content to keep surfers coming back but Tigermom & Simon bring up an interesting point - why would you want to fill your link list with shitty sites?
Hopefully you're right and people like me that take the time to build and submit quality sites will prevail in the end with good sales from the amazing traffic from link lists like Hoes.