Is there a market for penalized sites?

While having lunch the other day with some friends, the question came up, is there a market for penalized sites?

A few of us, including myself, have at least one major website in our portfolio that's been penalized within the past couple months for what Google claims to be "unnatural links" (Read: affiliate links in posts and sidebar with no "nofollow" attribute attached to them). All of us have since taken steps to address the penalty by adding "nofollow" tags to affiliate and other similar links on our sites, and, if possible, putting the links in a dedicated folder on our servers and masking the affiliate links and blocking the folder from being crawled in the .htaccess file. We all submitted reconsideration requests with Google, I myself three times so far, and after 2 or 3 months going by, none of the sites have recovered.

It should be noted that the sites we're talking about are "authority sites" with thousands of posts that we're making anywhere between $2000-$4000 a month, each. The sites haven't been deindexed from Google, however, their rankings have been lost due to the "unnatural links" penalty. New posts are still added to Google's index, according to Webmaster Tools and Google Alerts, but its hard to find them in the search results without going back dozens of pages. All the sites still have a huge social following and thousands of email subscribers. They don't make money like they use to, but they still pull in something. To give you an idea, my site that was making around $4,000 a month is now only pulling in an average of $1,000 a month. Thankfully, it wasn't my only money maker.

While we feel we've done everything we could to try and get the sites to recover, we thought that maybe there's people out there that have more experience then us, such as SEO experts, or people who have some sort of "connection" where they could take these sites and turn them around and into prime money makers again.

Is there or could there be a market for sites like these?