SEO for "product review sites" not so hot anymore? Looking for experienced marketer's opinions

I, like many others, took a big hit during the Panda disaster of late April/early May. I wasn't totally destroyed, but it definitely hit me where it counts. And it was painful.

Looking at the SERPS, I can see that almost every listing for buyer-centric keywords is dominated by big sites like Amazon/ConsumerSearch/ComsumerReports/BestBuy(or other online stores)/Goodhousekeeping, etc. A lot of people that ran successful WSOs on Amazon review sites have had their sites decimated as well (Jan Roos, Erica Stone) or at least the ones I've looked at.

I'm not saying all affiliate sites have been killed, but before where a search for a certain item would return 9/10 affiliate sites, you now get 1/10 affiliate sites and the rest are ecommerce or other large sites. It seems like those straight up affiliate sites that are in the top rankings are there out of sheer luck and it's only a matter of time before they get kicked in the ass. I had one that ranked very well even through the Panda stuff and it took a plummet too just recently.

So the question is, what have you guys been doing if your sites got dropped badly in the past few months? Google seems to be on a warpath of destroying affiliate websites and boosting big/ecommerce sites by the looks of things. I just don't see any real path through what's going on here.

The obvious answer would be "become one of those big sites" but that's easier said than done and would take an incredible amount of time, effort and money if you could do it at all.

If you were making a good income with the SEO/review site and got tanked recently, or are even still managing to do well lately, I'd love to hear your comments on the matter.