John - I'm suprised to see you taking an attack route on this, especially a personal one. The last few meetings and phone calls we've shared have always been so positive and friendly...
I think it's perfectly fair to disagree that rankings for certain phrases aren't a good indicator of link value - I think they are, other think they aren't and disagreeing on these topics seems fine. But, attacking me and SEOmoz seems out of character...
I also believe someone insinuated that we're charging for promoting directories somewhere. That's certainly not the case. We have a list of directories that we think are valuable (mostly college professors' lists, library resources, specific industry directories and that sort) but we sourced them privately and never requested a listing fee.
As for Aviva - I'm in direct email touch with Jeff, who runs Aviva and we're certainly not antagonistic. I'm actually trying to help him sort out why his site doesn't rank for terms and phrases that it obviously should be ranking for.
I'm hopeful that this debate could switch gears from a "how much does SEOmoz suck" to a "what criteria are valuable to determine if certain directories are worth submitting to/paying for" discussion.
Also - someone else noted that our page strength tool has been having some accuracy issues. We were running at about 60-65% accuracy (which is dismal, I admit) and are up to about 80-85% currently (which is still bad, but we're trying our best). The popularity of the tool is what's causing so many problems, as I discuss (and our lead developer details) here -
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboar...i-had-a-hammer
Sorry I check in here so infrequently - feel free to email me if you've got specific concerns.