How do you get traffic?

They perhaps wouldn't particularly give me pause for thought so much with the largely non-Google-dependent business model I have - they would with others, though. Mostly because how much Google likes/dislikes my sites is something I can't ultimately control, myself, I think - I'm one of those people who likes to be in control of as many aspects of my own business as possible, and not to be dependent on situations/circumstances outside my control, whenever I can avoid that.

Not so much, really, no - because as I mentioned above, I've actually done better, overall, for SEO with the sites for which I didn't outsource any backlink building.

This is true, but one can hardly help forming some sort of overall impression (albeit a subjective and maybe not completely reliable one) of "what's going on" when so many people apparently share the same experiences, and when Google comments fairly publicly about its objectives (as they sometimes do, on their own sites/blogs, via Matt Cutts' blog/video clips, and so on - albeit sometimes slightly in the form of what Wikipedia might choose to call "weasel words").

Yes and no ... I think that's perfectly true regarding the specific details and specific outcomes of those specific algorithm changes: the general principle, however (i.e. that Google can pull sudden and dramatic changes and people's businesses can all-but-disappear overnight as a result) is clearly highly relevant to many of us, and obviously it highlights the underlying precarious and unreliable nature of "search engine traffic", compared with other forms. That's neither unfair nor unreasonable, is it?

It doesn't feel that way to me at all, and I suspect you're tactfully giving some credit where none is really due: overall I had pretty poor results from outsourcing backlink-building, albeit that later and in other niches I had some very good SEO successes which arose purely as a side-benefit of something I was doing for traffic rather than for SEO (the point being that in the case of article syndication, the sites which syndicate one's articles, wanting to share them with their already-targeted traffic, are almost exclusively relevant sites to one's niche - otherwise they wouldn't want one's content, obviously enough - and their relevance happens to be what makes their backlinks so enormously valuable compared with most others). Google, it seems this year, values relevance and quality above all else. Fortunately for me, and all those here (of whom there are many) doing more or less the same things as me. In other words, the SEO successes I've had (which I admit have brought me income) appear largely unrelated to outsourcing backlink-building, and to be honest not directly attributable to my "implementing SEO", per se, at all!

This observation actually puzzles me greatly ... but in any case, to be honest, I'm instinctively puzzled by a new member directing all his first 6 posts specifically at me (and when I was initially an incidental poster, here, in someone else's thread) with specific questions - that's not a complaint, at all: it's just something that puzzles me - perhaps pretty understandably, because (a) I think it's probably unprecedented, and (b) my in-box suggests that others also find it rather puzzling.

Anyway, belatedly, welcome to the Forum, JLA.