You make it sound like throwing up a page about a specific keyword will help you rank after x days. That is simply not the case, if I'm building 100 links per

You make it sound like throwing up a page about a specific keyword will help you rank after x days. That is simply not the case, if I'm building 100 links per month & you're building 0 then my "time to rank" is going to be significantly shorter. You need to be looking at the total number of links to the top domains, the percentage of links they have that contain the anchor text & other factors may include the inception date of the document/domain (linkresearchtools gives you this).