Bill - Im very familiar with the source of those "propositions" about recipricol linking - interestingly the source article was written on the 10th of November - the same day that Matt Cutts posted on his blog that the update was just finishing up and starting to propagate to the data centers - and its trying to promote all types of analysis of the results - before the results are even visible
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/jagger-winding-down/
So how did he get all of this testing done and have the results from his test sites before the update was completed - easy - he made it up - like I said - total BS
I will also come out and say publicly that the day Google really devalues recip linking is the day that MSN takes over the search market - and Google knows it - why do you think they are trying this new analytics tool - theyre hoping that enough idiots install it to watch their site - so that Google can feed that into their algo as well
Google wouldnt spend the millions it does trying to filter out dupes, doing quality reviews and the hundreds of other steps they take - if they were planning to get rid of recip linking as a part of the algo
MOST important - the whole concept of their engine mathmatically is the democratic voting among sites - and they are not going to destroy the accepted method of linking among web sites that is established on huge old sites - just to get rid of a few spammers - they have much better ways of doing this and just because a few hundred WMs get hit for buying links or setting up loads of fake sites like goes on around here with fake interlinking for SE purposes only - doesnt require a devaluation of anything - it requires just what Google has done and installed smart filters that can tell the difference
The IBL OBL thing has been around for 3 years now so thats nothing new