Bill - I have to agree with Dave on this one - mainly because I've done exactly the same thing with a brand new domain - now I have seen a time delay on domains that were previously owned - I usually check the whois namespinner to see as the records in archive.org arent that trustworthy. But with a good basic site of content, and no other influences, I have never had more than a 2 update delay in getting high rankings for the targetted phrases. And I believe that is exactly the same delay that I have always seen and just has to do with linkbacks and page rank calcs.
Remember that one other thing that contributes to this "theory" of the sandbox is, in addition to the crap that most of these people bitch about not ranking with (the script generated 50k of page sites with 10k backlinks overnight) there are also the group of newer WMs that havent seen a normal Google update "cycle" so they dont know that waiting 8 weeks to be included in the index, another 2 months to rank well and maybe as much as a month for the addition to their index of new backlinks providing effects - is a very normal path to ranking well - they think it should be overnight - just like that wealth they expect to show up in their bank accounts tomorrow
