I'll try to answer your questions based on my experience but I'll just make it short as I'm not that good on answering questions
Here are my answer for your questions
- In my experience ranking is much harder than maintaining its ranking and yeah it depends on the algo of SE but that's the most exciting part of SEO
- Regarding link wheels, it's not that complicated
- I'm not a fan softwares, all submissions must be organic(manual) though I use a software for spinning articles
- Regarding the link that you posted, here's my take on it. YES it's an effective method of link wheel
- I am not conscious or never did I fear my sites being penalized from any SE, As a part of my experiment before, I have tried every technique from white hat to black hat methods and never was any of my sites being penalized (there's a long story with regards to the purpose of this experiment).
- Regarding with techniques, I settled for Grey Hat
(forgive me for my explanation as I'm not good at answering)