Thanks for the opinions everyone. After careful consideration of this and on the other thread I posted about my tights website the other day I have decided upon a complete redesign of both sites. Still using wordpress!
The affiliate stores will be dropped from both sites and instead moved to a .net domain. The .net version of the site is design not to rank in the search engines as it will be 1005 duplicate content. If it does rank, then bonus. The design of the .net will be more or less identical to the .com site, save different menus.
The .com will change from being an affiliate store with some articles and videos tacked on to try and provide some unique content, to being a place with 100% unique content. They will still have 1,000s of unique articles and videos and forum, but this they will server just as a community section and to promote the store. This approach will then allow detailed review on specific product ranges; for example, article on why red tights would be good this winter followed by a promotion of the store where the user can find all the red tights from all the retailers.
This narrowed approach will have great seo benefits too as it will allow me to rank specific pages of the site for specific keywords rather than trying to rank the general homepage for everything.
Thanks for making me question my whole approach. While my seo company moves with the time and is very successful, my marketing company is still stuck in a pre panda frame of mind where it was easy to take a merchants datafeed, put it on your own site and be ranking at the top of google 48 hours later.