I think with that you would risk the chance of Google viewing those as paid links, so I would be careful.  I think you should request that some of them be no-followed.  Then work on attaining other types of backlinks with that strategy, through stuff like guest posting and writing quality articles on your own blog, doing some type of interesting study in your niche that may be posted to news outlets, etc.

They are aware of the issue.  Their twitter stream https://twitter.com/SEOmoz has a tweet from 8/31 about the issue:

"Uh oh. It looks like our Keyword Difficulty Tool is having some.... difficulty. We're working on it now. Stay tuned, friends."

So they are working on it!  It is labor day weekend so it may take em a little extra time to get it up and going.

In the meantime, if you are in dire need of KW difficulty, you can get some basic insight the following ways:

Use Google Keyword Tool and look at the "Competition" level.  While this area refers to competition within Adwords - this can also give you a basic idea of how competitive the keyword is overall.  If it's a highly competitive Adwords term, chances are likely that SEOs are after it organically as well.

Do a quick check of the organic SERPs and check out the domains in the top placements or even on the entire first page.  Are these really high authority domains, how well optimized are they, etc.

For paginated pages, I recommend using the rel=next and rel=prev tags.  Here is more info:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html

Well, everyone might define "quality" different - so I would hate to say "yea that's TOTALLY fiine" but then find out that quality backlinks meant 300 press releases to you

What are you going to be doing to earn the backlinks?

I haven't used any of these services or tools, but I took a look at what you listed.

Removeem is more of a link management tool that lets you note who you've contacted and what the status is.  That seems really useful if you don't want to keep track of all this another way, such as Excel.

I am personally a bit hesitant to use "link removal services" but that's just me.

I also haven't had a chance to watch this yet - bookmarked it for when I have time.  It is a webinar from SEOGadget about link removal.  SEOGadget really knows their stuff so I am sure you will find some valuable advice in here.

https://seogadget.co.uk/adventures-in-link-removal-slides-and-webinar-recording/