Ditching the EMD for a brandable domain

I know everyone's fed up with the whole EMD penalty thing, and I seriously tried to avoid posting a new thread on the subject by using the search function for an answer to my questions, but I just couldn't find a satisfying one.

I started a review site at the end of 2011 and until a few days ago I was on the first page of Google for the two main keywords I was targeting. It sounds awfully familiar, I know, only mine is a slightly different tale, I think... The last update pushed my site from the middle of page one to the middle of page two, so it wasn't a disaster. Instead of around 1,000 pageviews from Google, it's down to around 350, but still making some conversions. Now, since my site clearly wasn't punished, just lost its EMD bonus, I could work a bit on linkbuilding and other SEO aspects, since I didn't really bother with that very much (just a few blog comments from related articles on established sites, and some bookmarking), but I'm not sure I want to.

You see, I've always had problems promoting my site, although it really only has quality content. Unlike other review sites, I actually bought the products I reviewed (then, after a while I started getting them from brands for the purpose of the review), wrote pretty lengthy (1,500 -2,000 words), informative reviews for users, not bots and posted video reviews as well. I also have over 50 well-researched articles in the blog section that were picked up by a few related sites, but because of the shitty EMD it's pretty hard to promote content. Nobody wants to link to KEYWORDreviewsite.net, regardless of how good a post or a review is.

Until the latest update, although I was considering moving to a new brandable domain, the EMD bonus was pretty hard to resist. Now that that's gone, I don't see the point in trying to get back on page 1 or searching for other ways to get traffic to the same spammy domain, although it probably wouldn't take much. So I was thinking of doing a 301 redirect of the whole site. It would be to a brand new domain (the EMD is 1-year-old) so I would lose that frail age advantage as well, but hey, I guess it would be worth it in the long run. This could become an authority site in the future, and I understand the redirect does pass most of the link juice. But, under current conditions, would Google see this as a way to game the system and penalize me for real this time?

I would hate to see all those hours writing and filming the reviews, and researching for articles go to waste, but I don't see a future for my current EMD site either. Plus it does have a few quality incoming links. What do you guys suggest I do? And if the 301 is a solution, do you guys think it would help to redirect each single page manually, or just a general redirect via .htaccess?

Sorry for the long post, looking forward to your replies.