White Hat SEO...Cesspool? Dirty? Useless? Does it Work?

So a new thread over at SEW (which always has the best ethics / white / black / gray / green / orange hat SEO threads), is questioning whether or not white hat SEO techniques are still relevant.

Most successful sites do not need to practice SEO, but is it worth doing low risk SEO stuff? If you are not going to be agressive about it why even do SEO at all? How do you define the line between what is risky and what is not? What is SEO and what is not? In the thread Jill Whalen made it sound like marking up page structure is not SEO. What is? Research papers dating back at least to 1998 show code structure is used to help determine relevancy (Marcia added the link to the SEW thread).

The thread also mentions that some of the White Hat SEO practices sometimes get nuked by more aggressive marketers. Interesting that at SEW some people also recently asked to hire SEOs who did not have arbitrary ethical hangups. Even Doug is realizing the end is near.

I do think the whole white vs black thing is a bit silly. I like Tim Mayer's knife to a gun fight analogy much more.