Anyone ever recover from Penguin?

definitely yes, you need to follow google webmaster guide lines and remove the bad and spam links and then you can submit your site to google for review. Recovery is difficult but not impossible.

My site wasn't manually hit so I'm not sure Google will even review it but we sent a detailed disavow report a few months ago.

I had one site hit by Penguin and a manual penalty. I spent months getting the penalty removed by cleaning up my link profile. Much of my trouble was caused by submitting articles to ezinearticles and having lots of low quality sites pick up those articles so that I had tons of exact match anchor text and lots of low quality links. Those weren't the only links that caused issues but I'd say they caused me the most work.

I did get the penalty removed but after waiting several months I saw no significant change in rankings or traffic. It may have been a timing issue with needing to see an update in the algorithm before my site would have seen a change. I don't know - I got tired of waiting and moved the site to a new domain.

I did not do a redirect from the old domain to the new domain. I simply removed all the content and left it a single page with an image that explained the site had moved and gave the new URL. The image was not hyperlinked to the new domain.

I contacted the high quality links I had to my site (natural links I'd earned from authority sites) and asked if they'd change the link to the new domain. Most did.

I saw my traffic increase several weeks after the high quality backlinks were updated.

My site has since recovered about 75% from pre-Penguin. Other than getting the quality links changed I've added only a handful of posts since I moved to the new domain. I'm sure that if I went back and actively worked on the site I'd recover the other 25%. (It's on my to-do list.)

Google have not re-run the penguin algorithm for 10 months, so anything done in the last 10 months can not be affected by Penguin.
Care to explain how you actually submit your site for review if you have been affected by the Penguin algorithm?

I also had a site hit by Penguin, similarly for article directory links that a previous SEO company had spammed out to every article site in existence with the same anchors and same URLs. Stupid I know. I did not have a manual penalty but it was clear that the loss of rankings were as a result of Penguin and an over optimized backlink profile.

I outsourced my link removal efforts to Linkdelete.com who had been actively advertising on here for some time right around when this Penguin issue came about. It took them a few months of removing links and submitting the disavows they provided me before I started to see some recovery in rankings.

After seeing recovery it took about 6 or so months to regain rankings to my previous levels. I've since been a bit more hesitant in building links or using SEO services on this specific domain. I'd rather let the dust settle a bit more before heading down that road again and especially because another versions coming out soon. Fingers crossed.