aristotle - 3:47 pm on Oct 15, 2012 (gmt 0)

No but there are no clearcut examples of anyone doing anything else that worked either.

Are you suggesting that there's no way for a site to recover?

Actually, it may very well not make any difference whether you remove any backlinks or not, since Google probably devalues them anyway. But in either case, I don't see how a site can ever make a "full" recovery unless it acquires some new "natural" backlinks to replace those that are removed or devalued.