Oh man this is me to a T. Its hard to explain to others that the rest of the time spent farting around online is really a primer for this. If I just tried to come in for an hour and leave It would never be an in the zone hour.

Oddly the handful of sites that I have which should have most probably been affected negatively actually saw boosts in traffic, CTR on ads and eCPM on ads. Not huge jumps.. but yeah.. I benefited which was odd. These domains are testbeds I set up a long time ago to find the upper limit of what you can "get away with" in google so I know where to draw the line.

Other interesting facts. I rand some tests over the weekend (may not be large enough to be statistically relevant yet) but it seems the farmer update has almost no impact on indexation of poor or duplicate content given enough raw link juice (no anchor, ip diversity or any other cool factors, just a flat link from a big ol' bucket of link juice) which I find disappointing. =/ I expected a bit of a challenge after all this hoopla. Even though I rock the greyhat Im still pretty anti dupe/crap content.

IP based bans are really rare within google. If you can link to your site that'd be great. Im wondering if there might not be a robots.txt problem or something else that may have arrived from the move as apposed to an IP based block.

well the first thing Im seeing right off the bat is google seems to prefer the address you just gave me however that redirects to a subdomain reflecting your desired keyword. When did you do this? I would

A) make sure that you are redirecting properly

B) if its only been a short while give google time to figure out whats going on here

C) make sure that any links that previously pointed to the root domain be switched to your preferred address.

Edit: Take a look at this...

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?site=http%3A%2F%2Fcharterstowers.e-village.com.au%2F&comparisons%5B0%5D=e-village.com.au%2F

small caveat to the endorsment above... IP diversity does seem to be a rather important ranking metric. It's been my experience that Quantity and Quality need not come from the same source. If you've got some great quality links, and a bunch of quantity only type links.. it seems to still result in a net positive.

Six things I normally look at linkbuilding wise (in no particular order):

Authority/Trust
Niche Relevance
Segmentation (links in content > links in sidebar, footer, comments)
Anchor
IP diversity
Linkweight (Juice, PageRank, whatever)

As long as you have elements of each of these SOMEWHERE in your link profile you generally do well.

Other than that I agree with these fine folks. Also automation is great for scaling but it almost always leads to a great reduction in quality and possibly could end up being a wasted effort if the rejection rate goes up enough as a result.