How do you know that "a ton of link exchanges" are responsible for the ranks?   Just because you see 'em doesn't say that they are doing anything.

If you allow the links to be followed the recipient gains benefit and you lose PR through each link.

If you nofollow the links then recipient does not get PR and you still lose it.

What I described above his how Google most recently said they do things.

Are you saying that this is harmful and these links should be converted to a reciprocal do follow and if not, removed altogether?

I can't say anything about reciprocals.

I have pages similar to yours where I simply link to resources.  I don't have any relationship with the websites receiving the links.  This is simply a resource that might be helpful to my visitors.

If I owned your website I would optimize that page to compete for a relevant keyword.   The resources pages that I have hold good google rankings for good keywords and pull in more traffic than they send out..

One thing for sure is that I would not call it a "links" page.

When nofollow was first announced, Google said that it could be used to "sculpt" pagerank.  Then Google changed their mind and allowed pagerank to evaporate - but they didn't tell anybody for a while.

So, just because Google says something today, you can't count on it being true forever, because they can change their mind but keep their mouths shut.

Do you have an explict answer to those questions that will avoid a Penguin problem?

I think that they can be harmful to your site - especially if you use keyword anchor text.

If these are the only types of links that you have, I think that your site will be hit by Penguin.

If you do one or two per day... it will be enough to get you in trouble by the end of next year.

If you use "nofollow" you might be safe from a link penalty....  But it would not surprise me if these sites had Panda problems because of all of the very similar pages - that could be considered doorway pages on doorway domains - and when you link them together you paint a target on them.

Then there is the low-quality EMD problem.

You seem to be expending a lot of time, thought and money into trying to rank a bunch of hotdog stand websites.  (The links between them are more dangerous than helpful.)   I think that it would just be better to work on producing high quality content on the main site and allow the hotdog stands to expire.

If I was your competitor I would be amused watching you playing around with 28 hotdog stands while I was building quality.

Cookie cutter pages like these stopped working in Google about ten years ago.

If you toss them up I think that your entire site will tank.

I would go back to focusing on quality pages.

If you see a good domain that is not being used by a viable company don't hesitate to write to the registrant to see if you can buy it.

This frequently works and you might get a perfect domain for $500 to a few thousand.