If you're thinking strictly about how 'link juice' flows through a page, then yes - static links are the way to go. But you also have to ask yourself how easy it is for someone to find and click the links. The site still has to be usable. So yes, static text links are generally best - but one can still mess that up as well.

The page you mentioned has some pretty good points regarding basic UI/UX. If you do static links properly, more or less what was discussed in the article, you'll reduce page rank fragmentation and present a better experience. What's not to like?

If you're designing for multiple devices, functionality that calls for navigational hover actions isn't the best idea. So there's another point against drop down navigation. Also, if you look at this site, you'll notice there isn't a whole lot of drop down happening until you get to search functionality and tools.

It's not an infinitely scrolling website. I'm going to drown myself now.

I would say don't use infinite scrolling, not yet. A designer doesn't understand. They want everything to be fancy. Google isn't terribly ready for fancy yet.

At this point, I think infinite scroll is a horrible thing that needs to be shot in the face.

"Hey guys, let's load the entire site - all of the bells and whistles at once!"

That can be really mess with page load speed. So what about time to first byte? It doesn't matter if the first byte appears at the speed of light, if you're loading 450 MB.

If the Webmaster Central Blog didn't answer your question, you're pretty well on your own.

Yeah, the URL changes. That's duplicate content. Handle it with a drop down menu. You appear to be kind of borked for the category pages, if that's how you're going to approach it.