"After posting I was curious... would there be a "nofollow" already? And there was, and somehow, this left a bad aftertaste. If I'm taking time to link to relevant content, isn't it just greedy not to respect this as a real and meaningful link?"

I think that you, and maybe the rest of the "SEO community", place too much importance on the fact whether Google will follow a link or not. For me, and for any other human viewing your post, there would be absolutely no difference: I would receive the value you added to the original post, by reaching the relevant content. This is what hyperlinks were invented for, PageRank was just a secondary effect. (And comment spam – a tertiary.)

I was talking about potential other tools too. A link is just that, a connection between two sites, and it may be used to theme those sites (say A talks about "cars" and B talks about "autos", then this would strengthen the relationship between those two words if you want to "understand" the web in terms of semantics). But yeah, possibly if it's just about Google I can live with it, but then again, if we should *not* care about whatever Google does with the link... why do we use "nofollow" in the first place? Its only purpose is to explicitcly tell Google to not follow it. I did not include the "nofollow" here in the forum, so you may say I already do care less than others.