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I'd say you need to get a full overview of what's been done so far - and sign-off on anything that they're planning to do for you in the future (including tactics, target media and so on). You might find this helpful: http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/what-is-nofollow/  See the bit here, under "How do we get natural links" http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/unnatural-links/ Switch to PR focused work, in the future, where your submissions are editorially reviewed (sure, some will be rejected - yet this is all about quality over quantity). This is a good rundown of what not to do: http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/seo-to-avoid/

Well, I will certainly look into that. Really though, just in the meantime, I'm very curious if someone could at least make a call as to which of these two procedures works better -  Find a way to SEO optimize 20 variations of similar pages covering a similar topic (but different enough that all 20 need to stay) -  SEO optimize each of the 20 pages for the same keyword I have searched everywhere, I cannot find a cogent answer as to whether cannibalization would happen in option 2, or if it would pretty much work (although again, your idea is way better, I'm not suggesting my procedure would work nearly as well)

Exactly this. Thanks Richard for explaining it in this way as well.