Ignore SEO beyond the basics, and focus your efforts on other things. If you're in travel/accommodation, go all out to get the best ratings on TripAdvisor as an example - competing on Google is an arms race that wastes time. If you lose on TripAdvisor, at least you'll do so trying to provide superior service.
If you're a plumber, encourage word of mouth and other viral methods (discount vouchers for referrals, etc).
For almost any business in a competitive field, throwing money at SEO will only escalate. Win a different way.
Enterpreneurs care. And I mean really care. Because ranking equals their cashflow, simple as that. And hackers are the best to ask for advice when searching for a complex engineering problem. That explicit desdain for SEO is misguided, at best.
It's a legitimate question, although maybe not worded perfectly. I care whether it's me or someone else who ranks for a keyword, maybe my site is better, and I (like anyone else rational) would prefer to make the revenue. I think understanding what ways you can gain links that is still acceptable under Google's guidelines is a very important thing to know, and truthfully pretty difficult to figure out. If you try to build a really great product and never tell anyone about it, I don't think you will last long enough for Google to give you the proper recognition.
Check what your best performing competitors are doing. Usually they will be doing something grayhat. There are a lot of practices (eg. link exchange) that Google has publicly frowned upon, but stopped short of actually enforcing against. You get left with the option of being uncompetitive when it comes to SEO, or adopting the grayhat practice and getting penalized along with your competitors whenever Google does start enforcing against it.
Because competition is so high that to rank on any damn keyword it may take years without link building.