SEO is great for developers but he was paying for SEM, those folks cold contacted sites to link back to him, that takes a lot of time to do and SEO alone won't get you to the top of the SERPs for common keywords.
Lame or not the proof is in the search engine result position.
2. Maybe it's lame.
3. Rarely successful? Any data there? It has certainly worked for the people I've done it for.
4. PageRank is not the goal. Qualified, revenue-producing traffic is the goal.