Google Reconsideration Request Rejected

So when all of my sites were penalized by Google for hosting unnatural links which was a consequence of accepting guest posts both directly but more likely linked to using My Blog Guest I immediately put in a nofollow plugin to auto nofollow all links, then did a sitemap and ping re-index submit followed by a reconsideration request.

Unfortunately, a week later Google still found my site violating quality guidelines, but I was curious why the site was still not meeting Googles terms and conditions if they say nofollow isn’t a penalty.  So I am filing a 2nd reconsideration request because maybe something wasn’t indexed, or I need more information as to what is violating quality guidelines, as besides nofollowing every link in all posts, pages and comments, not sure what else they are going to find that would be in violation of ToS.

Meanwhile, has anyone else been hit by Google and did anyone succeed in getting their manual action removed recently?  I know a few bloggers who instead created entirely new sites and ported over all content putting 301 redirects on their old site as a result of the penalty, but this isn’t something I particularly want to do.