Since the long forgotten "Florida" update, a lot of people were of the opinion that an over optimisation penalty/filter/degrading of rankings or whatever you want to call it was happening.
It looks like Google has enough information now, with Chrome up to a huge 25-36% market share, depending on what stats you look at, that's it's safe to assume they are using a lot more than on page, and off page data as a part of their key relevance x's, particularly for highly searched for or highly profitable key phrases.
We could think of the best way to build our pages, get the best possible links to them, but if people aren't sticking around, recommending your site to friends or at the very least bookmarking your site and coming back, all of which they do on the tubes with full videos that rank above a lot of shit right now, then I don't think it's going to help link lists much.
The only thing I can see any small "mom and pop" or single adult webmaster do in this climate is find a niche, and make it yours. This is nothing new, that has pretty much been the advice I received from day 1 in this biz, but because I had success with my shotgun strategy in the past, it's hard to change what has worked in the past.
There are a lot of things which have already been mentioned in this thread that I won't repeat, but everyone knows things need to change if link lists are ever to be prominent in search engines again.
I used to own a Gay link list, and if you're not too squirmish about seeing a few naked men without any women around, I would take a look at how
GayDemon.com has changed over the years as a perfect example of how to evolve a link list. Bjorn has continued to be very successful in the search engines, probably because he has always provided a lot more content of his own than most regularl link lists.
SEO is a lot different now than it was 10, even 5 or 2 years ago. That's just my humble opinion.