Yep. "target=_blank" is one of those things that, like pop-ups and BLINK, seemed like a good idea at the time, but proved too easy to abuse. If I want to make your site more "sticky," I'll open links in new tabs by myself. This should probably be blocked by default in most browsers.
I don't think <blink> every seemed like a good idea[0]. It was an undocumented easter egg that was created so that Lynx could have some of the advanced text formatting that was coming with the new graphical browsers.
I don't think that's much of an option. For instance i live in Japan and here most users expect that things will open in a new tab. Take a look at the amazon search results page as an example