Originally Posted by EGOL
Noj... I think that the points that you list above as 1, 2, 3, 4 are correct and a good analysis.
lol your not going to argue anyway because they are complementary.
CASE A: The problem that the new website will encounter is that some of the websites that republish the articles will be stronger than the new site and outrank it for important terms in the SERPs where it hopes to compete. Although this creates links it also invites strong competition.
Only if the articles directly compete in the target serps, so using the real world illustration, the sharpe site in my footer I released no artciles targetting the term 'sharpe books', but they all related to the field,were relevant and contained a link that said 'sharpe books' or variants of.
Thus incoming links with no competition for any of my target terms.
Interestingly I re-used many of the articles in the news section just because it was useful content and im now ranking better for the reused content than most of the original linking sites.
CASE B: The website without an accomplished writer that relies on article syndication soon runs into a duplicate content problem if they are publishing the same articles that they syndicate. If they syndicate unique content, that requires two articles for each keyword that they desire SERPs for (one for their own site and one for syndication).
I use one quality of content for my site and another quality of content for syndication. I think going forward content first the way to go, but sacrificing time and content at the start for those extra klinks at the start really helped the site kick in.
So, I believe that it would be better to spend double the work on one high quality article for your own site than half the work on each of two low-quality articles that will not perform well.
If you have the links yes, but if you dont ?
Content without links is dead ! - another post for that
I think this is a case 'horses for courses' 
Cheers for the other pointers.